As we become increasingly dependent on online email like gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and on online documents and online blogger services like wordpress or blogger it’s getting far too easy to forget to back up data.

Backup is a simple process in some cases and almost impossible in others, but I think the overall reliability of the services may lead us to think we can’t lose. I’d sure hate to lose all my blog posts and emails from the past months, but I have to admit my backing up leaves a lot to be desired.

It’s not clear to me how well services like Yahoo and gmail backup our stuff such that it would be hard to lose it, but given how easy it is to delete accounts I fear that a malicious hacker - or even a toddler clicking - could kill a lot of work fast.

Even if you backup faithfully, increasingly frequent are the cases where people are suddenly deleted for “violations” of the oblique terms of service that have become common.

Danah’s got one such story about a friend’s temporary deletion from Google, and Robert Scoble had a recent Facebook incident as well which was resolved later but really seemed to shake him up a bit.

I suppose the lack of horror stories may indicated that the big players are doing a good job making sure data is protected and accessible, but I’d sure like to have strong assurances of that as we come to depend on these services for more and more of our online lives and livelihoods.