Meyer on cloud computing (google docs)

In his blog post, the cloud and its risks, Bertrand Meyer describes a bug he found in Google Docs and uses this case to highlight the strenghts and weaknesses of a cloud-based solution like Google Docs.

Bottom-line: you depend on the cloud provider. If you want to avoid all potential data loss, you have to make an extra backup of your data on local storage or use an online storage service like Amazon S3 as an extra backup. A precondition is that your cloud-based solution (like Google Docs) offers an API so that you can get your data out of the service.


Thinking about this: wouldn't this be a compelling business case: an application that regularly gets all your data out of your Facebook account, LinkedIn, Google Docs, Gmail, Hotmail, whatever and makes an extra (secure) backup of that data.