Deleting the Family Tree – Ancestry.com erased 10 years of correspondence
> It’s natural to assume that service providers like Ancestry will be good custodians of our data,<p>No, never. Not Ancestry or anybody else. In this very moment my computer is running my daily back up my Google Drive (customers write stuff there) to my USB disk (I know, I should need a better disaster recovery solution). Not that Google doesn't provide a good service, but I don't trust them to preserve all my data until I need it, possibly tens of years in the future. I better care about it myself.<p>I consider anything stored "on the cloud" as expendable. If I really care about it I back it up in multiple copies. I have a couple of servers where I send encrypted backups using duplicity.<p>Is this too much for the average computer/tablet user? Yes, but there won't be a market for proper consumer backup until enough people has been burned by this kind of things and all cloud services will start offering an export procedure.<p>Meanwhile I think it's worth using self hosted services. For my company I have a self hosted redmine with all the details of my projects.