But GoDaddy can pull my DNS name just as easily. Or my ISP can cancel my hosting account. Or the government can break into my house and steal my desktop.

There is no such thing as a safe system with one point of failure. No matter what medium you use to store data, you must always have a backup. It's the only way to be sure.

(Personally, I pay the $5 a month for a Google Apps account. It's convenient to let Google host my email, but if something goes wrong, I can always change my MX record and start collecting my own incoming mail again. And, I don't have to block ads anymore :)

I have two small servers (plug computer) on two different locations / providers / IP addresses with all my data. They are synced by rsync. That is my own small redundant cloud. Not expensive and quite easy to setup with some Linux knowledge.

I'd be curious to see a write-up of this. What are the details? Since these are plug computers are they just at two residential locations, or are they actually in co-lo? How do your keep your desktop/laptops in sync? Remote mount? also rsync?

I have a house and a flat 120 km away from each other. One is the master the other the slave. The master is read/write the slave read only for the clients. They are mounted with sshfs (not ideal with interrupted WiFi connections / reconnect issues, might switch to WebDAV) by the clients Laptops, Desktop, Nokia N900es etc.. They sync with a cron job. Also they test if clients are nearby (Wifi) and rsynces them for backup purposes. The main data is all on the master/slave servers. I sync manually to clients if necessary for offline work(driving by train etc.)

The plug computer is a Sheeva plug. There is a low power WD USB 1 TB drive connected, power consumption in idle is <5 W.

Thanks for replying. I imagine you also have some sort of backup regiment outside of the 'cloud.'

Why? Do you think this is insecure?

Well, it's a mirroring technique. Sure you're mirroring to an off-site location, but I'm assuming there is no versioning happening (i.e. snapshots). If a file becomes deleted or corrupted on the master, then that change will propagate to the slave, and you will no longer have the file.

Correct, but one can use rdiff-backup http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org/. Since I use mercurial for critical files I have some versioning.

Ha, you're right: GoDaddy would and DOES rip off customers and screw them by capriciously pulling their domains:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/03/godaddy-silence

In support of your (and my) point: Local storage is now dirt-cheap, small in size, and spacious. Exactly the WRONG time to start turning your data over to someone else to store "in the cloud."

Storage is cheap, but administering a well-secured mail server is difficult. Providing search and spam filtering is even more difficult. There's a reason why people pay others to maintain email servers: it's hard.

Sure E-mail, but not things like media storage.