Arjan posted a link to my "Making the switch to online apps" post on his link blog today.
Ok, first let me say that I'm always flattered to be included in someone's link blog and I'm pretty sure I've been in Arjan's a few times. :-)
Second, I also realize that many people have been using online apps for a long time and what I wrote is nothing new. It seems to me that Scott Hanselman made the move to Google apps last year and did a great job writing about it. :-)
Anyway, Arjan made the following comment under the link to my post:
"Online can be handy, but do you trust Google to make backups for you?"
To be perfectly honest, I suck at doing backups which means that for the most part, I don't do them. Yes, I know...backups are important, and I do take some very basic steps such as copying important files to another computer in the house, but I really don't take anything offsite.
As Scott said in his post:
I trust them (more or less). Backups are hard. So, in the whole scheme of things, I'd rather have my data in Google's datacenter and believe they're doing the right thing than potentially losing everything when a hard drive in my laptop crashes.
Either way, I run the risk of losing data, but it seems less likely with Google.