i can honestly say that i've never been locked out of an account or lost any information to a third party.
Yet.
That said, my driving paranoia pretty much ensures that while living in the virtual cloud can be nice, it's also nice to realize you've got nothing but vapor under you.
Thing is, with any company that provides service, one of the terms of doing so is the right of them to remove said service at any time, and for any reason, often with no compensation for you. It's buried in the terms of use you agreed to and may have actually read. Some services are nice enough to provide you access to your data for recovery purposes, but since the bulk of terminations (not saying yours, but the bulk of 'em) are for some legal reason, "data recovery" usually isn't something they (or the various legal authority that demanded the termination) are willing to offer.
This is one of the reasons i tend to be a tad overly paranoid about my data. i use social services like Delicious, Flickr and what-not as public display not private storage. Heck, i've got mail accounts at yahoo and google that i happily provide folks, but they're not my domains primary mailer (even if my hosting service would REALLY like me to use google) mostly because that would mean that my mail is routed first through google and not my hosting provider.
Mind you, while i trust Dreamhost for my online presence at the moment, i also know damn well that i need to take regular, monthly backups of everything i have online since it's just as likely to go boom as anything else. i run regular backups (thanks mysqldump! You're my best friend!) and make sure that everything there, lives somewhere else.
i guess what really surprises me is that reasonable, smart folks are literally tossing all their eggs in one multi-colored basket, and then being traumatized when bad things happen. Makes me wonder if they have only one bank account too.
People call me paranoid when I mention that I have a "spare" bank account that I almost never use at a bank completely unrelated to my primary bank.
I really can't argue much with them, it's just that I prefer "prudent" to "paranoid."
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The annoying thing is when other people are using Gmail and you're like "hey is there a way we can communicate where all of my information isn't being ferreted into some enormous, privately-held database?" and they're like "Yeah but… free!"