On the one hand, I don't agree with this article. But that's easy for me to say - I have backups, and I've worked hard to make them work properly. I don't have

On the one hand, I don't agree with this article. But that's easy for me to say - I have backups, and I've worked hard to make them work properly. I don't have to entrust all of my precious data to "the cloud" via my relatively slow network connection. 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. :)