Gmail has grown to be a fairly popular email system, especially for small business owners and folks that want access to good Webmail that can be accessed anywhere. When it was launched, with a full gig of storage space, it was also touted as a great place to store giant files in order to keep your desktop less cluttered. What many seem to be missing though, is the fact that just because something is run by someone as big as Google, doesn't mean that there might not be problems.

There's a thread over at Google Blogoscoped this week that talks about a user that found his account deleted, including all the business emails and documents that he kept stored on the system. While I obviously feel for the guy, it also makes me wonder how many other folks out there might be relying a little too heavily on Google with the expectation that Google can safely protect their documents. Keep in mind, Gmail is a free service, and they have no obligation (other than to maintain good will) to spend exorbitant amounts of money on data backups for you.

So if you are using Gmail as a primary business account, give consideration to using the pop3 version of it so that you can store copies on your hard drive as well as backing them up to disk.