In Perpetuity?

We always hear about how once you put something on the Internet, it's out there forever. Although that's kind of an exaggeration—I mean, even if the random document that you stored on some server for a half an hour is still stored on a remote desert island, the chances of it being discovered, associated with you and used against you are miniscule.

Anyway, we rarely hear people saying, "Make sure you don't put stuff just on the Internet." It seems equally as, if not moreso, dangerous as putting stuff on the Internet in the first place.

For example, all my e-mail is stored on Google's servers. My school e-mail forwards there, too. I conduct all my personal e-business through Gmail, and only very rarely do I print something out. What if, for whatever reason, Google decided to delete all my e-mail files? I'd be ruined.

That's not to say I'm super paranoid now. I'm not about to download my Gmail archives, and there's no way I'd go and print out every message on there (I'm sure I'd be embarrassed by most of them, anyway)... But I'm starting to think I should.

And I'm not alone in this boat. There are so many users of Gmail—and the other free, Web-based e-mail services. Is it good that our lives are in their hands?