Tech Marshal

Gmail users previously were able to backup their emails offline using Gears, a Google plugin allowing web apps to run offline. But recently in May, Google announced that it shifted focus to HTML5 and stopped the development of Google Gears. As a result, those users who installed the versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome released after May could no longer backup their Gmail account using Gears.

The good news is that Google has brought back the ability for Gmail users to access their emails even when they are not connected to the internet.

The functionality can be achieved by installing “Offline Google Mail”, a new chrome web-app based on HTML5 that updates in the background while you’re online.

Incase the internet is not available, simply open a new tab in chrome and launch the app. From there you can compose, read, search and archive emails. Offline Google Mail will automatically sync the changes once internet connectivity is available.

The streamlined user interface, based on Gmail’s popular tablet interface, provides an extremely fast response time with a pure, email focused experience.

Install - Offline Google Mail

One of the many features that Google introduced in its newly launched social platform: Google+, is that it displays all your Picasa web albums in the photo section of your Google+ account. You can view photos from your circles, your phone, your own photos and of course, it allows you to view, edit or delete your Picasa web albums directly from the Google+ interface.

What’s the link between Google Plus Albums and Blogger Posts?

Many Blogger blog users are not aware that the photos they use on their blog posts are saved in their Picasa web album. So when they join Google+ for the first time and see all their photos from their blog, they assume that the photos are also viewable by their friends and family members or even anyone who isn’t in their circles.

This is when the problem starts. Some Google+ users start deleting their albums and can unknowingly end up deleting the albums containing photos they have used on their blog posts for years.

This can easily be avoided. Users must know two things to be on the safe side:

1) Albums that you have not shared will be visible only to you:

As a Google+ users, you shouldn’t be worried about your blog images showing up in the photo section of their Google+ account as only the images that you share will be visible to your circles.

2) Deleting Photos from Google+ will also be permanently deleted from Picasa web album.

Any Picture that you remove from your Google Plus account will also be removed permanently from Picasa web album, hence from your blog if you had used it on your blog.

When you are about to delete an album, a dialog box will be displayed stating that photos will also be removed from Blogger, Picasa Web and other Google Products.

Related: Backup your Picasa Web Photos and data from other Google Product

The Data Liberation Front, an engineering team at Google has launched a new service called Google Takeout, allowing users to create backups of data from various Google services.