DMGOwn Your Data.
Back in July, Google deleted Jack Yan's blog on Blogger. Google thought it was a spam blog, or "splog", and nixed the thing. And he's having no success getting any kind of explanation from Google, let alone any help getting the blog reinstated.
This is in contrast to the way Jeff Atwood reacted under similar circumstances. Atwood publicly absolved his hosting provider of any blame, and realized that he should have had his own backups.
Let's be clear: Yan wants Blogger, a free service, to go find and reinstate his blog. Atwood, who paid good money to a hosting service that was supposed to have backups of everything, just got busy rebuilding as best he could.
Now, I completely understand where Yan is coming from. He's been extremely patient, he's trying to help a friend, and Google has the only existing copy of the blog. So there's just no other way to go. But still. This is much less a story of how Google fails and much more a story of why you shouldn't build anything you care about on someone else's foundation.
This blog runs on a server I rent from a hosting service, using a domain name I own, software I wrote, and data I created and own. I have backups of everything. So if my ISP goes kerplooey, I just install everything on a new server and I'm back up and running in a jiffy.
The moral to all these stories is: If your data is important to you, make your own backups.