I know you're just trying to make a point, but... > Can you recommend me a way to do that for a non-technical person? 1) Use IMAP with copy-to-local-drive fo

I know you're just trying to make a point, but... > Can you recommend me a way to do that for a non-technical person? 1) Use IMAP with copy-to-local-drive for email; Thunderbird or Apple Mail or a variety of other applications will do this reasonably for a non-technical person. 2) Store your files and photos on your hard drive, or a hard drive plugged into your wireless router which can then expose it as a network drive (e.g. Apple's Airport Extreme can do this, as can other wireless router). 3) Use Crashplan for backups. This is fairly easy to set up, even if you're non-technical, if you back up to their server. This does rely on Crashplan, but they're the backup, not the only copy of the data. > I mean what would you do if apple/google wrote an update to their os that wiped all of your contacts for good? Restore from the contacts backup I store on my hard drive every so often (and which hence gets backed up via Crashplan). This part is fairly rocket-science for non-technical people, unfortunately. > just like your example of loosing access to my memories because Facebook decides to destroy it's own brand. The real question is what happens if/when Facebook goes out of business...