Earlier today (or yesterday, depending on your time zone), Ayende wrote about the consumer pitfalls of software-as-a-service (see Software as a Service is a matter of trust)… which made me think of some of my own “saas” experiences.

Back almost two years ago, CodePlex went down for a few days and suffered significant data loss when it came back up (see CodePlex: Did they forget to back up a server?). That was the last time I willingly used CodePlex for any open-source project.

I also remember some time back when I tried various online backup and synchronization tools. I tried XDrive (soon to be defunct) — which worked well until I realized it corrupted a large chunk of my documents. FolderShare (now Windows Live Sync) was impressive but had a habit of sync failures and/or deleting when it shouldn’t. (Granted FolderShare was a beta, and Live Sync is not, so many issues may be resolved.) In the . . .

→ Read More: Be cautious when using online services (or: you get what you pay for)