Can you trust web services?

[mdlbear]

One of my coworkers was appalled this morning to discover that Netscape's web-based calendar service "is no longer available." -- along with all his future appointments, next week's flight information, birthdays, anniversaries, and all. The error page goes on to say:

We are actively working to improve the Netscape experience, and plan to launch a new and improved calendar product in the near future.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. As always, we thank you for being a Netscape member.

Yeah, right. Don't trust a web service that doesn't make it easy and convenient for you to make backups. (I was delighted to see the --backup option in the command line client for LJ's photo hosting, now in beta testing.)