That the problem is so widespread does not surprise me.

@ Sandeep R: You make a valid point about dot-com firms sprouting everywhere. In the last 14 years of using the web for commercial and personal purposes, I would not be unhappy to try anything but it will take me a lot to entrust something valuable to something totally new or untested.

@ Rambler: Sandeep R answers your question. Caveat emptor applies like in everything else in life.

@ Leroy Glinchy: Thanks for your note.

I see your point but I also think the adoption of the web is way beyond being driven by social pressures. In that respect, we are making the choice to remain always-on knowing what it takes away from us and trading it in for what it gives us.

@ Reema: There are several better ways of taking back-up than DVDs.

I would however not stretch the analogy to banks. Banks are far more closely regulated than small, web start-ups are. Their capital adequacy is closely monitored by the regulators. The burden of reporting on banks is also far higher. Accordingly consumer protection, whether it is a private bank that fails or a nationalised bank that goes belly up. is also provided for, within limits.

@ Harini: That is a good point, of course.

By the way, Gmail has long been out of beta… unless I am missing something in your note.

@ Nova: In a multi-component system, reliability would suffer depending on how the components are arranged relative to the others. So the odds of early failure can go up or down. I have a feeling this is becoming a complicated technical point but if we see life as a web of inter-connected things, we can see their dependencies. That would help us build redundancies so there is no single point of failure.. makes sense?

@ Amit: Redundancy rears its head again, and I agree.

@ Mohit: Enterprise computing indeed will pay close attention to the “trust” issue if cloud computing is to take off, so to speak.

Although I am not sure how one might build redundancy in the car scenario that you mention… Some failures could be pretty final in their impact. No?

Good point you raise about not trusting something in “the cloud” – trust might be a major deterrent to the widespread adoption of cloud computing, especially in the enterprise world.

i would agree with Reema, take a backup on something you own. DVD, external drives, paper don’t just trust online stuff.

even for something as basic as my gmail account, i have a hard disk back up – there is no guarantee that when they get out of their beta stage they won’t start charging per MB !