Phil Wainewright: “The idea, by the way, that users are going to keep their own private backup somewhere else, as Google’s PR rep suggested in an email to TechCrunch, is patently absurd. The whole point of storing email in the cloud, surely, is to avoid having to download hundreds of megabytes to your hard disk every night just in case the service falls over.”
If Google thinks that users need to keep their own private backup somewhere else, then they need to provide tools to make backup-keeping dead easy, or else admit that there’s a major problem with their services.