I always get strange looks when I tell people they should break the DRM on anything they buy and back it up to their personal music/book library. But then stuff like this happens (or that time Amazon deleted purchases of Nineteen Eighty-Four off users' Kindles) and I look a lot less like some nut claiming we never really landed on the moon. For my own part I had Barnes & Noble's Nook app delete a whole bunch of notes I'd painstakingly made on a manuscript, and their tech support staff were about as understanding as a bowl of potato soup.

A lot of people, though, especially inside the Apple garden, don't see any other possible way of doing things except through proprietary products. I once had someone tell me, "You don't use iTunes? But then how do you listen to your music?" When I told her I open the folder in the filesystem and double-click the songs I want, I don't even think she knew what I meant. It's easy to make the case for keeping independent copies of your data when you're talking to a techy person, but most people aren't techy and won't get it until something like this happens — and even then they won't really know what happened because (as you can tell from this article) companies aren't especially open about the details.