A couple of years ago, Kodak's online photo storage service (in the UK at least) shut down. We just barely managed to get copies of the hundreds of pictures we had stored there in time.
Other recent (non-photo specific) examples of vast amount of data disappearing:
Geocities. Yes, large chunks of it was archived last minute. MegaUpload.
And we have Rapidshare on it's way to disappearing.
Cloud services can and will shut down, and it is not at all a given that we manage to preserve the data.
This creates a relentless churn where some proportion of older data disappears every day. All we really can do is to fight to keep the churn rate low enough, because we have no realistic prospect of saving everything all the time.