IndyRob - It may seem as though a discussion related to 'computers' or 'software' in general is a bit off topic here but I am inclined to think that reading this thread could cause a number of people who like to keep their recipes online, and/or in some kind of an app, rather than in a hard copy (book or paper) or even on their own computers (accessed via a purchased program or just in a note/file, etc.) to think carefully about whether that is the only way they want to store recipes that are 'precious' to them. We have had a number of threads here talking about what app, etc. that people like to use for their recipe storage.
Several years ago, I carefully scanned in recipes from my great-grandmother's handwritten cookbook (of which only one paper copy existed and it obviously cannot be recreated) and was going to make a real cookbook from those recipes - at least for family distribution, if not more. I took backups constantly however one day I dropped tea on that computer keyboard and fried it. I tried to move the backups to a new computer but for some reason they would not move in any form that was readable - apparently not just the keyboard was destroyed. I could not just go back and redo the work either. The original cookbook was ruined - it was left in a place where rodents got to it, unbeknownst to me - and it now is history. I learned a valuable lesson. Now, I keep several paper copies of anything important and I keep them in different places, and I back up my computer religiously. And I put those backups, like DiggingDogFarm may do, on hard media (DVDs) and a couple of external backup drives as well as keeping copies on different partitions on the same computer. I may never care about any recipes as much as I did about those family ones but I don't want to find out later when I no longer can find them that I did.
In short, while I don't think most need to be as paranoid as I am (and DDF says he is too), I do think they need to consider how much they value their recipes, etc. and consider where/how they store them - and whether they would be concerned (and what they would do) if their culinary data (or access to it) was lost.
