[troymc]

Some thoughts:

- If you pay $50/year for Google Apps, you can use your own domain name, so you can change your mail server without changing your email address, and you also get access to customer service from Google. I have Google Apps and the one time I contacted them, they got back to me right away.

- Just like it's a good idea to backup your local computer, it's a good idea to backup the data in your cloud services. There are numerous options. Backupify, CloudPull, and ThinkUp (thinkupapp.com) are some which come to mind.

[Tichy]

You don't even have to pay to use gmail with your own domain. I find it difficult to find the relevant links, though.

[fauigerzigerk]

It's here: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

I use Apple Mail for backup. The only issue is the TTL setting for the DNS MX record. Some domain hosts set this to 24 hours, which means it may take up to 48 hours for all mails to get through after you switch to a different mail server.

[Ecio78]

but in this way you dont have support and if something is not working you have no one to complain with.. even though it seems by what i'm reading here that no one is safe, neither paid google apps users...

[yaix]

To backup my "cloud" data, I need to click through vendor specific data download pages every time and then download gigabytes of data every time.

A backup of my local data is semi-automatic by running a shell script that rsync's everything to my USB HDD. I like local better, I think.