I like the idea of having all my data online, accessible anywhere from any computer with an internet connection. But I don’t trust online services enough to actually store anything even remotely important there, without a local backup.
Online service providers have bad policies that make them lose your data, or go bankrupt and sell all their hard drives.
Flickr is fine for publishing photos, but not for a photo archive, and the same with delicious.com for bookmarks. This is also why I don’t use GMail or Google Reader. In fact I haven’t even tried GMail because I know that I will not use it. I don’t trust toomik.net 100% either: every so often I make a local backup of my blog.
Better safe than sorry.
Oo. I’d never thought of that in regards to gmail. I use it for most of my non-work-related email these days. The vast majority of it isn’t anything I need to save permanently, though, so it saves my hard drive space from my inability to delete things. If I lose my old emails, that’s okay. Even so, it’s a good thing to remember! Thanks for pointing this out. :)