Meditations on cloud computing

The short version: it's all fun and games until somebody loses an archive.

And the problem is that most cloud systems aren't really set up for either user-controlled, external backups or staff-produced restores. Not the free versions.

( Longer version )

So I am left with either trusting Firefox's native bookmark-restore or making periodic manual backups which are, of necessity, specific to one device and not available online either. Xmarks comes closest to the functionality I want, and even that doesn't really provide for external backups. This seems to me to be a bit of a blind spot in the whole system.