Hacked accounts make cloud services vulnerable. Back them up if they contain sufficient value to you.
Reasons to consider backing up a cloud service
Google wipes all your data (easy and cheap "sanatizing"!) before returning your account, in some cases when an account gets compromised:
- http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/law_policy_and_it/who_s_watching_the_store
- This was written by a Cornell staff member.
- ChemIT know of a campus IT peer whose account was similarly compromised and subsequently "sanatized".
Your DropBox.com account gets hacked and all data removed:
- http://www.businessinsider.com/professor-suffers-dropbox-nightmare-2013-9* College Professor states, "I Lost Tons Of Critical Files Because Of Dropbox"
Or, you do something you didn't intend to do, resulting in loss of data.
Services ChemIT has heard of, or in some cases have personally used
Backing up Google services
There are a number of services which promise to regularly back up your Google docs (Drive), email, calendars, and contacts. We're sure none are panaceas. However, they do seem to represent reasonable protection for restoring a hacked (and subsequently blank-slated!) account. You may also value being able to recover an individual item mistakenly delete. (Seems easy to restore specific docs and emails, for example.)
Oliver personally uses (9/2013) Spanning Backup. Usually costs $40/year, but you can save $5 by using Oliver's discount code if you decide to subscribe:
Full disclosure: If you use Oliver's code, he'll get a $5 referral fee from Spanning Backup. He recommends using their 14-day free trial to test-drive first.
Backing up DropBox.com and the like
Here are some promising, but untested, tools and services: