CNET: Hotmail incinerates customer files

Sun's old saw "The network is the computer" seems to be coming true, even if Sun itself didn't manage to be the company bringing it to us. That said, you better darned well back it up, because network services holding your data tend to have occasional hiccups, losing massive amounts of user data. Alexandria Felton's Hotmail account is only the most recent example. Customers tend to be out of luck when network services lose data. Ira Rothken, a lawyer who has litigated against companies for such incidents even seemed sympathetic: "Frankly, it's understandable. There are always going to be glitches that lead to data loss."

But in the past, data storage was not advertising supported. Marketers could now be exposed to the same branding liabilities these services risk. When a brand pops up each time a user accesses a certain message or file, that brand may also be permanently associated with its loss.

Now that email services are promising gigabyte level storage, the problem is likely to become much worse. The services most famous for losing data were the networked storage firms Myspace.com and I-Drive.com. Without much notice, those to bubble-era firms blew up, leaving many users without their data. In an incident that still riles some, Photopoint closed down, taking with it massive quantities of personal digital photos from more than a million customers, later coming back only to offer retrieval for a fee.