Why backing up your data is dead

Second, not everything is collaborative or needs to be shareable.

Third, you can be optimistic, but there's no denying that at today's transfers rates, getting something into and out of the cloud is an arse of a lot slower than pulling it off a HDD or even a LAN.

Everything we've done so far in the realm of online document creation will be as a toy compared to what is to come. Starry-eyed optimism is great in some settings, but calling for the death of backups is not the right way to build momentum.

On the other hand, this article is saying what I've said for years: web apps are winning because most people have no idea how system administration works, have no desire to learn, and would happily exchange money, privacy, and freedom for a storage medium that doesn't die every two to five years, taking all of their data with it.

For most of the computer users in the world, it's not so much a question of whether backing up your data is "dead", but of whether it was ever alive in the first place.

Last week an Apple Genius told me that my Macbook's hard drive had crashed. He spoke in a sorrowful and apologetic tone, like a surgeon coming to tell me that my mom had not survived her appendectomy. This surprised me for a second, until I remembered that the typical customer regards the loss of a hard drive as a terrible tragedy, rather than as an excuse to thoroughly test the integrity of his multiply redundant SuperDuper backups.

(Incidentally: SuperDuper works great. And no, I do not own stock in the SuperDuper guy's company. :)

And if they are not?

I don't see all your documents online, nor do I see your important documents (will, birth certificate, marriage certificate, shares, personal papers). This type of app I'd rather have on my desktop.

Your tax return may not seem too important until somebody uses it to empty your bank account.

I'd prefer to do those in the reverse order.