Don’t Mess with The Google

I've worked in IT for over ten years, and have not once, once seen a blu ray in person, or ever handled a machine capable of reading one. It'd be incredible afraid to have my backups in something that requires some expensive exotic device to be written/read.

You'd be much better off with USB sticks.

This leaves most people in two categories: those who haven't (yet) had a catastrophic, unrecoverable data loss, and those who have. Leaving it to others, or all your eggs with just one service is an invitation to the first group. What I can say is it's almost certain something unimaginable will happen, be it a data center, service shutting down, or something getting corrupted.

I want to echo my experience of losing 16 years of email with Hotmail over at Microsoft due to the wind blowing arbitrarily in a different direction for a few months. I had my MSN messenger log in automatically to keep my account active on Hotmail, a criteria which was quietly ended. Unforgivable for me. Had some of it backed up luckily in real email clients but lost some critical emails and photos with a friend who passed away.

People who either haven't generated enough of a digital footprint and lost it are going to be in for an inevitable surprise with the online services that they take for granted as being ubiquitous. While the cloud is awesome, it is still quite in it's infancy.