Site Deaths
indiewebcamp.comThe site says "you should own your own identity and content." Well, that's great in theory, but where should I put my identity and content? Should I store it on a flash drive? That seems a bit risky. Should I have a bunch of flash drives in security deposit boxes? That seems like a huge pain in the ass. How about a site where I can upload all of it! Well, now we're back to the same problem - but instead of it being on many sites, it's just on one.
I think the real answer is decentralization. Maintaining your data in many different places on the web and trusting that it's very unlikely that all of these sites will go down. Security and privacy, of course, is an entirely different matter.
Distributed replication tools exist. Use them.
Rsync will keep basic file archives coordinated. Git is quite useful for content that changes in a structured way.
Maintaining even just 2-3 copies of your data will go a long way to ensuring that it doesn't disappear entirely.
Reminds me of http://archiveteam.org, who also make efforts to save the content from these closing sites. I contribute occasionally; well worth doing.