Hacked!
As email, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the "cloud"-remote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and from wherever we want them, all the time and into eternity-a brush with disaster reminds the author and his wife just how vulnerable those data can be. A trip to the inner fortress of Gmail, where Google developers recovered six years' worth of hacked and deleted e-mail, provides specific advice on protecting and backing up data now-and gives a picture both consoling and unsettling of the vulnerabilities we can all expect to face in the future.
By JAMES FALLOWS NOVEMBER 2011 The Atlantic