[kermitthehermit]

First off, some people have NDAs where they must not store any kind of file in the cloud, nor disclose anything at all (like the load of a server, graphs, the specs of the hardware, the used software, anything related to the company, its clients, its visitors or its services) to any third party.

So, as you may see, there's a point for this.

Also, don't forget that all you want for the replication already exists. You can easily replicate the mongodb data to another machine or back it up and save it somewhere else periodically.

As for giving each machine a unique id, this is a cool idea, but this implies that you have enough resources to set up your own monitoring system to monitor multiple hosts. That implies that you can implement something redundant.