A couple of days ago, Google Docs went down. Plenty of people found this and commented on it both in FriendFeed and Twitter. Other people went to the Google Forums to post about the error. It was obvious it was widespread and affected regular users as well as paying customers. All you got was a server error when you tried to visit any of the Google Docs domains.

I've been enjoying the benefits of Google Docs for a while now and am basically a convert to them. Multi-person editing and the availability from any machine are the two key things for me. Sure, it requires a net connection.  That part I've known. Most of the time I have net and when I haven't I've just taken notes on what needs to be modified on current ones or created documents that are later uploaded.

When the service itself was down, I got very worried.  I worried about being able to get to it before my deadline. I worried about a critical server failure that would cause recent (or all) changes to be lost. Simply put, I worried and second guessed using Google Docs.  This fear is now permanent.  I don't know that I will ever fully shake myself of it. (It's like the first time your computer crashes after hours of editing something and you lose it all.  You'll never use an app that doesn't autosave or have crash recovery again.)

Now, before you ask about the offline mode of Google Docs, I don't think it would have helped here.  First, I think you have to be able to access the page to hit the offline button. Second, Google Gears doesn't currently support Firefox 3 (it says it does online, but my Firefox 3 clearly shows that it doesn't). Also, you have to think ahead to use Google Docs in offline mode. Finally, you then lose the benefits of any computer and any web browser -- you have to use the one that you did the most recent sync to, and it might not have your latest changes.

I stopped using MovableType's web editor for doing posts a while ago. I now almost exclusively use Windows Live Writer. It does an excellent job of layout, handling images and media, and uploading everything flawlessly to my blog. It auto-saves and can be used when I don't have a connection to my blog. However, it is a truly connected application. If there was something like it for Google Docs, that would be pretty cool. 

This also means I can fully draft blog posts even without a net connection. For blogging, that happens frequently. This is either because we're out of the country or completely away from all forms of net connection. We've found ourselves frequently in areas without cell coverage and without any form of wired connection (dial-up or otherwise). It's more common than you might think once off big roads and away from big metro areas.

I'm pretty certain that's the future for applications. Instead of using the browser, which requires a net connection, a fully connected application will be written to do the same thing. Since it will automagically and immediately sync to the online storage the data will still be accessible from any machine that has online access. And when your daily machine doesn't have access, everything still works normally. It should also still have the online editing portion. I think this is the goal with Google Gears, but I don't think it's quite there yet.

So what am I supposed to do now? There is no easy way to just backup all Google Docs at once. You can download them as HTML in zipped form all together, but I want to download them in their native format and all zipped.  In the short term, I'll probably start editing locally for more important items. The convenience of Google Docs is too hard to completely pass up, though.

If you're going to use a web application, make sure you're aware that your net connection isn't permanent and probably isn't even under any SLA (some business connections have this, but probably not business cable or DSL). In addition, be aware that even the largest service providers may have outages. Google hasn't posted any information about the recent outage. Although it appeared very wide spread, they implied only "some" users couldn't access it. If it was a partial service outage, they may not even consider it service down time. That doesn't help the users who couldn't get to it.

Anyway, enough ranting and rambling about this. Ultimately, it came back up and I got my doc finished.

(UPDATE: I've added a screenshot to illustrate Gears not being supported by Firefox 3 on my machine.)