> If I had to place a bet on whether the files on my desktop will outlive the files on my Google Drive, I wouldn't take it. I have files on my desktop which ha

> If I had to place a bet on whether the files on my desktop will outlive the files on my Google Drive, I wouldn't take it. I have files on my desktop which have lived on it (and its predecessors) for longer than Google Drive existed. Some might be older than Google itself. That's probably not an uncommon case. You say "you changed computers and the data is gone", but it's far too easy to copy your documents folder (or equivalent) from one computer to the next, either directly or through an intermediate burned CD or external disk (which ends up also becoming an informal backup of that old data). Meanwhile, I have already lost access to at least one Google account (the one which was originally my Orkut account); if I had any files on it (instead of just using it to log into Orkut), I would have lost them.