How to prepare yourself for the next GMail outage

On 1st September GMail was down for quite some time and took the the whole web world along with it.People are so dependent with google that they simply can not think about a situation like this.

This is what Nik Cubrilovic from TechCrunch says in a blog post during the outage.
I use Apps For Domain for everything - my contacts, my email, my todo list, my chat, my documents and more recently, my phone. As soon as it went down, I noticed in less than a second. I am now completely stuck, after a few months of being impressed by how I was able to run my entire life on Google.

And This is what Google had to say in a blog post about the outage.
We know many of you are having trouble accessing Gmail right now — we are too, and we definitely feel your pain. We don't usually post about minor issues here (the Apps status dashboard and the Gmail Help Center are usually where this kind of information goes). Because this is impacting so many of you, we wanted to let you know we're currently looking into the issue and hope to have more info to share here shortly. If you have IMAP or POP set up already, you should be able to access your mail that way in the meantime. We're terribly sorry for the inconvenience and will get Gmail back up and running as soon as possible.

While a company like Google probably should have done more to avoid a situation like this,How do we prepare ourselves for the next GMail outage? Following steps might help you in a situation like this.

1.Set up GMail Offline so that you can work with the offline version.
2.Set up rules to Auto forward your mails to another account.
3.Have access to GMail from Mobile devices.
4.Turn to social networking sites like twitter and facebook to know what people are doing to avoid the situation.

If you keep in mind the above steps then it might help you avoid a critical situation in case of another outage.