I myself keep backups of my documents on all my drives – my laptop’s drive (in my Windows /and/ Linux partitions), my USB flash drive, and previously my USB external 500 GB drive before it decided to toss in the proverbial towel (and it was only about 2 years old). In addition, I have my documents uploaded to both Google Docs and Adobe Buzzword. That way I’m fairly assured I won’t lose my data.

The only problem I have with the services is that they get rid of any formatting I have in my documents, so if I ever want to edit them with OpenOffice or something, I have to and redo all the formatting.

By keeping my data on my hardware…

1) It’s under my control and I control who has access to it. When you upload it to a 3rd party, there’s no telling what can happen to it–intentionally or otherwise.

2) I keep backups in case of failure. This is the main point *against* keeping data on your own hardware because most people *don’t* backup their data.

3) Web services can go down at any time for any period of time–briefly or permanently with or without warning.

4) If you want access to your data remotely, there are a number of methods open to you where you *don’t* have to trade security or privacy for the convenience of web services.

5) Data files are not necessarily proprietary. Microsoft Office, Open Office, photos, movie files, emails/email accounts, and many other formats are platform independent.

All photo sharing sites have the ability to keep photos private. As far as how much space you get, this depends on the service. Most services don’t necessarily have a size limit but rather a transfer limit such as 500MB per month. When the limit is reached you have to wait until the next month to start transferring again. Paid accounts don’t have that limitation.