Accountability in 'the cloud'

Ignoring the irritating marketing term of 'the cloud', I'm all for putting stuff online. I'm a big user of dropbox, which lets me store files in a datacentre somewhere. I use google docs from time to time, which lets me access a file from anywhere I happen to be. I use Evernote on my laptop, phone and work desktop. It's all good.

But... what about responsibility for that data?

Call me paranoid, but what about backup and restore? I just can't get away from the fear that all my data might get lost and the response from whichever company loses it would most likely be 'meh'.

I'm feeling this more than ever as I start to use a fantastic GTD online wotnot called nirvanahq.com In Beta at the moment, it's growing slowly and the development team are adding and refining features following user feedback.

The problem for me is whoever's running the site is completely unaccountable to me. They're developing something as a business but right now they're not taking any funding from it and I have no idea how they're paying for it.

The upshot is that although the beta site looks great, and I really want to use it, dare I trust my organisational life to it?

I've felt the same way about Toodledo.com, an offering I use at the moment. It's more established and has pay plans in place, but as a user there's no information about who runs it, how profitable it is or in fact any information that might help me decide whether I want to trust in the platform.

If any of these businesses are in trouble, will they tell their users? Doubtful. If the business folds, would users be told then or would the first sign of trouble be when the site drops offline?

Outdated as it may be I find myself craving good old locally installed desktop software (with sync to a mobile device of course) which lets me do whatever I need to do, and makes looking after the data my responsibility.

I know many people will steam ahead and stick everything 'in the cloud' given half a chance, but I suspect the real vision of cloud computing isn't going to convince people like me until there's a simple, coherent way to backup your own data.