Google+ allows users to inadvertently delete years worth of blog photos

That's a shame, but at the same time you have to wonder who would store five years of photos using an online service and not have a single backup. Buy one or two cheap portable hard drives and do a monthly backup of all of your can't-live-without files to both drives every month. Store them in a safe place and don't use them for anything else. Problem averted.

Edit: Or shit, at least have a copy on your computer.

That really sucks. Still, these people should have considered the possibility that the photos were not copies and that they would be deleted in both places.

Yeah sure. Why should you do backups when you can start whining and pointing at Google instead...