The Wall Street Journal recently ran an exhaustive report on a startling discovery: Online photo-sharing sites may not store your photos forever. In fact, if you don't pay or use their services for a long enough time, they may delete them much sooner than you think.

Is this really such startling, disturbing news? Isn't this obvious to anyone with half a brain?

I'm sorry, but anyone who trusts any online service to store anything for them into infinity is kidding themselves. Web sites are not altruistic services that exist to give you a helping hand. They have to make money. If you stop paying them or do not in some way bring new business to them, they will cut you loose. After all, the sites have to remain viable businesses.

The Journal's report notes how most sites sent e-mail warning notices before they deleted the photos, and that the users missed them or ignored them because they thought they were spam. What, exactly, about this is shocking? It's certainly not new. The concept of saving gigabytes worth of personal photos (and sharing them, too) is a relatively new phenomenon, but online data-storage companies are almost as old as the Web itself.

Seven or eight years ago, I discovered a site called XDrive. It offered a then unheard-of free 100MB of online storage. I bit and used nearly all of it. But as is the case with many online services I use, I moved on to other interests and services and, well, kind of forgot about the files I had stored at XDrive. I would occasionally get e-mail messages from the service encouraging me to upgrade to a paid service that offered more storage. I ignored them, too. One day I got an urgent notice from XDrive. It explained that the company was discontinuing the free service and I had 90 days to offload my files. That would have been more than enough time to download the 100MB+ of stored files (even on my 56K modem) had I read the message when I first got it. Unfortunately, I read this message just one week before the deadline. Suffice to say I did not succeed in downloading my files. This unfortunate incident taught me a valuable lesson: Never leave data backup to online services.

Consumers taking megabytes upon megabytes of digital photos are, if I go by this article, losing just as many to the capricious demands and practices of these online photo services. But they have only themselves to blame. These photo sites are not and should not be used as photo storage centers. They're best for sharing photos, printing, and creating photo tchotchkes such as mugs and mouse pads. I would never trust my photo collection to any single online service—free or paid.

Of course, paid sites will, if you keep forking over money, keep your photos forever. They protect your photos from catastrophic server failure with massive redundancies, but no data security plan is fail-safe. And, what if the service goes out of business? Sure, you'll have time to download your photos (or transfer them)...if you don't ignore the e-mail notice.

I can't say I like what the photo-sharing sites are doing. Cutting someone off because they didn't log in often enough is cheesy at best (I ran into this practice first on Microsoft Hotmail), but the infrastructure costs on these sites can be quite high, especially as they grow more popular and consumers store more and increasingly larger photos. They have to have some dependable way of generating revenue, and typically that's either eyeballs on Web site/service ads or annuities.

Breathless tone aside, The Wall Street Journal article does provide valuable insight on an important topic. But why is this article necessary? Perhaps it's because the general media continue to do an abysmal job of educating consumers on the risks inherent in technology, and users have developed the disturbing habit of adopting technology at lightning speed with nary a thought to how it might adversely affect their lives.

Wow. This kind of makes me sound like a Luddite. I'm not, of course. I'm just someone who understands that for every ten good things about a given technology, there is usually one bad thing, and it often has the potential to wipe out the ten good ones in one fell swoop.

So go ahead, use these photo services. Just remember to control your own destiny: Keep your backups local, make multiple copies, lock one set of CDs or DVDs in a firebox, and do your best to preserve the longevity of your photo collection.