DreamGrow Social Media

But what if the sun comes out?

I have been using cloud services for some time now. The most important of which is the Google Applications for Domains. GMail can be automatically backed up to your computer via POP3 or IMAP but what to do with Google Docs, wikis, Flick, Youtube and other services? In Youtube and Flickr you can archive the originals. So Google Docs is most problematic for me as the documents get created in the cloud, the cloud is the original. The same goes for social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, etc.

Naive as I am, I assumed that the big players (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and others) actually back up their data. Now, in the light of the T-Mobile and Microsoft loosing users personal data (contacts, notes, calendars, etc. ) it seems that we can take Linus Torvald’s advice on back up:

Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it Torvalds, Linus (1996-07-20). Post to linux.dev.kernel newsgroup.

If Facebook would lose user data then it would be a permanent loss because there is no way to back up you account. Even if you would make a copy of everything you put on Facebook then there’s no way to restore it after the loss. The time and effort that has gone into building the profiles and communicating with peer would be gone forever.

A lot of our stuff is in the cloud. But what if the sun comes out? What is the probability that Facebook, Google or others would loose user data permanently. What would be a good way to protect yourself?