J-P Stacey posted up a modified version of AA’s 12 Step program about backing up your data.

8. We have made a list of all the files we have lost, and have become accepting of the fact that we never Backed Shit Up and it was our fault.
9. We have suffered for our loss of such data wherever unavoidable, except when we happened to have Written Shit Down on the off chance as well.
10. We continue to take a filesystem inventory and when we forget to Back Some Shit Up promptly admit it.

Jeffrey Zeldman and Tantek Çelik (amongst other very smart people) had a conversation across several media and sites about owning your data.

Here’s the cliff notes / reading order. It’s totally worth sifting through it all.

• Tom Henrich captured a fair bit of the Twitter conversation.

  technophilia by tom henrich”)

• Jeffrey Zeldman’s post had some great comments as follow up
• And then Tantek wrote a response on his site

Just a few of the many, many highlights.

Glenda-B! tweeted—

@zeldman @t Totally neurotic but big data is 3.0. So much unstructured data & I give my content to the void, but I can't query against it?

Jeffrey Zeldman—

Twitter needs to do a better job of storing its data. It probably needs to open source and share the data across multiple servers not connected to Twitter.com. LOCKSS: Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe.

Tom Sparks—

This issue becomes more and more important as security tightens in the US and as networked social services become more and more important. I am hoping diaspora or a similar solution becomes viable in the near future.

If smaller organizations can run their own social network platforms and if those platforms can be linked between organisations, that would be a WIN. Groups or super individuals could control their own data and share it in the ways they find most useful.

Tom Henrich—

I backup my tweets not because I'm concerned that the historians of the future will be denied the benefits of access to them, but so that I can more easily refer back to them if there was something I wanted to look up. You noted Twitter's search has some pretty extreme limitations, and that's not acceptable to me.

Tantek Çelik again on his site—

Simply copying from these shared social services still leaves you vulnerable to their flakiness, poor auto-shortening of links, unscalability, downtime, maintenance, database failures, and acquisitions.

That's why I don't post to other services and copy to my site.

That's not what I'm doing.

Tantek:

I'm not copying from Twitter. I'm syndicating and copying to Twitter. As I said, Twitter is the copy.

There's a big difference. When Twitter goes down, I can keep posting, and my updates still go to the other destinations that take/share updates, e.g. Google Buzz, Identi.ca, Friendfeed, and whatever other service(s) might come along to replace them all. I'm not beholden to Twitter's stability/downtime - the copies there will appear when Twitter returns from such outages.

If your data is vulnerable to some social sharing services' whims or flakiness - you don't own your data - they do (their terms of service even says - they can do as they please with your content, with Flickr as perhaps the only exception).

Tantek’s conclusion:

Your site should be the source and hub for everything you post online. This doesn't exist yet, it's a forward looking vision, and I and others are hard at work building it. It's the future of the indie web.

Jeffrey Zeldman had a thing or two to say about selling your company or product to corporate ownership.

Though bits are forever, our medium is mortal, as all but the most naive among us know. And we accept that some of what we hold digitally dear will perish before our eyes. But it irks most especially when people or companies with more money than judgement purchase a thriving online community only to trash it when they can’t figure out how to squeeze a buck out of it.

And with the possible exception of Flickr (better now than the day Yahoo bought it), I can’t think of any online community or publication that has improved as a result of being purchased. Whereas we can all instantly call to mind dozens of wonderful web properties that died or crawled up their own asses as a direct result of new corporate ownership.

And finally, a bit of advice.

Stop selling your stuff to corporate jerks. It never works. They always wreck what you’ve spent years making.

The whole thing is worth reading.