A recent spate of moans on the web about losing access to information and photographs brings home the dangers inherent in cloud computing.

If you pay for a service then you can reasonably expect it to continue serving up your data until you stop paying. But the freebies, like Facebook, YouTube and Flickr for example, are no place to store the only copies of your precious photographs and videos.

You can pay for a Pro Flickr account but if you forget to renew your subscription you’re locked out of your photo library as Robert Scoble discovered recently.

The same goes for Facebook as Daniel Hayter discovered. Facebook shut his account down when they mistakenly suspected he was spamming the system, and 5 years worth of photos instantly disappeared.

Then there is the news today that Tr.im, the URL shortening service, has closed it’s doors. After December this year none of the links created by Tr.im and archived all over the web will work.

So why has this happened? Money. Or the lack of a viable way for the service to make any. No-one is going to pay for a URL shortening service.

Lessons will have been learned, and some are still to be learned, about the downsides to cloud computing.

Keep local copies, keep backups, and don’t trust other people with your precious data, photographs, videos and audio files.