Keep your own backups
This fella lost 7 years of data.
http://consumerist.com/2011/07/google-deletes-last-7-years-of-users-digital-life-shrugs.html
Why was he using free online programs for his supposedly important email? This I don’t get – my email is my life. I see absolutely no reason to entrust it to anyone online, I don’t care who they are or how trusted they seem to be. Any online email service is used for junk mail and subscriptions that I’m pretty sure will going to result in spam. Not something important.
I do understand wanting to access your email from anywhere. Most ISPs nowadays offer webmail as well as setting up an email client locally and I see no reason not to utilize both. I like having my email near and dear to me and make backups regularly. I simply copy my email folder/profile to a second hard drive. This has worked for me since 1996. But to leave it all online? No way, Jose.
His blog was also shut down. Not real sure of the reason, probably something deemed controversial, and in fairness to this guy – it probably wasn’t. He didn’t keep a backup. I know the feeling. Google has shut down one of my blogs in the past. And while they did restore my blog, they didn’t restore my posts. I had a backup, went and bought a domain name and put it on paid hosting. I haven’t used a free service for anything but junk since then.
Reasons why you might lose your content:
- A human being decides that you have violated the terms of service and de-activates your account.
- A server crashed somewhere and all data, including yours is gone. Or someone simply wasn’t paying attention to what they were doing.
http://www.google.com/appsstatus/ir/nfed4uv2f8xby99.pdf
http://consumerist.com/2011/02/google-mistakenly-resets-an-estimated-150000-gmail-accounts.html - Your account gets stolen by a script kiddie who gets your password by figuring out the answers to your secret questions.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/22/george-brock-sentenced-facebook-stalking_n_907506.html
Keep your own backups!