But regardless I’d still not trust any online backup. I like the idea a lot and I even have an Xdrive account, but there is no way I’d trust them as my sole backup.

Really?

I’m with Ian Murdock in that unless Google can offer some sort of redress for f**kups, even on the part of it’s users, then it’s not going to fly with Joe Average user.

In the UK, some folks invested unwisely in company pensions without reading the small print in the guidance booklets. Years pass and the company director runs off with all the money before dying and the pensioners are told the T&C means you have no redress. The small print in the original guidance booklets, in tiny font just over the copywright notice on the booklets, also say this.
No one really reads all the T&C and any service who holds their customers to the strict letter of the T&C without some flexibility will probably not survive in todays world.

Tough cheese for the guy who had his Google account deleted (it’s not mentioned here how it got deleted, was it through lack of use to keep the account fresh?).

Regards,
Imran Chaudhry

PS. thanks for debian :o)

Corporations are still corporations. Even when they have personal loyalty, that can change overnight with acquisitions, management shakeups, and stockholder pressure. If you don’t have a contract, you have no assurance. You’re just hoping. That’s one thing if it’s a friend, but I wouldn’t want to trust the integrity of my data to a hope.

I don’t think the future of this model lies in anything like you’re describing. I don’t think it relies on trusting other people with your data. I think it instead relies on making all vendors increasingly interchangeable because your data is in open formats using open standards, so you can pipe the data that you want into the services that are useful at the time, and still recover it and give it to other services should your needs change or the services change.

But then, there’s no way on earth you could get me to use Gmail for my e-mail. So call me paranoid.

“Software as a service” would be more like providing the service of *writing* software on a service-based arrangement, and licensing the software freely but not exclusively to the customer who paid.

If you refer to hosting providers as “software as a service” vendors, you’re muddying the term for those who actually *do* provide the service of writing software.