This seems a little misguided. Firstly, I don't intend to create most of my important documents in a web application for a long time yet (read: 5-8 years at le

This seems a little misguided. Firstly, I don't intend to create most of my important documents in a web application for a long time yet (read: 5-8 years at least). It'll be awhile before there's a high-quality IDE/real Photoshop alternative/video editor/etc. online, and who wants one anyway? The desktop paradigm rules for its speed and better support for multitasking, so much so that I believe it will never really go away. 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.