Losing your data isn't considered good practice or fun. Losing all your data, when it includes lots of other people's data, is surely much worse. When your business is in saving data for other people, losing it is dire indeed. The popular social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia was recently in just this predicament.
The best way to ensure the survival of data is to make resilient copies of it in different physical locations. If I'm not mistaken, Ma.gnolia users were able to export their data (at least, before it was lost!), and could have done this. Del.icio.us and Google, along with many others, provide export functionality for the web applications they host in which users store data. So if you use one of these services, and you're diligent and skilled enough to work out how to export the data and store if somewhere else, you'll be fine if the service loses your data.
That's already quite a high barrier. Most people don't have the skills, time or inclination to back up all the data they have in the cloud. Do you back up your GMail account? Your Flickr photos? Well, maybe you do, or maybe you don't use these services, but you get the idea.
Much worse than the technological barrier that makes data like this hard to export are legal restrictions some sites impose on their users that actively prevent them from exporting their data. Perhaps the most well-documented case of this to date occurred in January last year when the prominent blogger Robert Scoble was kicked off Facebook after he tried to extract some of his data.
Other bloggers have pointed out, both before and after the Scoble incident, that Facebook's commercial competitiveness relies upon gaining control over users' data. Facebook isn't alone in using a business model like this, and this sector is where the greatest concern over data survivability should be directed. If you can't copy your data elsewhere, even if you did have the skills, you can't do much to guarantee its survival; your data is in the hands of the corporation you have entrusted it to, and if they lose it, it could well be gone forever. The archivist in me is raging mad at the thought of that!
Fortunately, there's a movement opposing such data traps: Data Portability. It has a long way to go yet, but it's a good start. As we become increasingly reliant on data in the cloud, the survivability of that data becomes paramount. Since that survivability depends upon portability, data portability is crucial. So what are you waiting for? Head over there, and get involved; empower yourself to secure the survivability of your data.
And if you need convincing, or you want to read stronger opinions than mine on the topic, why not read these posts by Marc Canter and Richard Stallman?
Here’s a prime example of what can happen when users don’t take the opportunity to copy their data elsewhere, and count on the persistence of a data host which then shuts down.
And here’s a good account of why one Toodledo user didn’t lose sleep over Toodledo’s outage earlier this year.