Why should I care?

Your world is moving online

Your address book is on Facebook, your photos are on Flickr, your documents are on Google Docs, your bookmarks are on Delicious, your budget is on Mint.com, your emails are in GMail.
Does any of this sound familiar? As online services become more and more popular, we are finding there is a greater reliance on third parties to look after our important data, for free.

But what if they lost your data?

Someone steals your Myspace password, your Flickr account is deleted, Wesabes servers crash, Hotmail gets shut down. It could happen.

How would you be affected?

Would you lose your baby photos, you know, the ones that were on your old computer that doesn't work anymore? What about those account details that you had stored in your Gmail account? Would you be able to recall all 300 of your Facebook friends to re-add them?

It'll never happen

It does. You forget your password and can't retrieve it. You post an innapropriate picture on your Flickr, and your account gets deleted. You get a virus and someone steals your Facebook password. Even big companies can lose your data, just ask Danger, a subsidary of Microsoft.

But I'll just ask them to get my data back

You could, but there's no guarantees. Most of these services are provided for free, and most will explicitly say in their terms and conditions that they have no responsibility for what happens to the content that you submit to them.

Take responsibility for your data!

If your data is important to you, YOU should be ensuring its safety. Sites like Facebook owe you nothing, they provide a free service which works great, but they have no obligation to you. You have no one to blame but yourself if you don't take a copy of the things that matter to you.