Comment by bscphil

> The rarity is immaterial

Of course it's material. If a provider has a 0.001% chance of losing some of my data in a year, I'm an idiot for not having backups. If a provider has a 10% chance of losing some of my data in a year, I'm an idiot for not having backups and for using that provider.

GMail is (usually) not an enterprise product and not a paid service, and provides no reliability guarantees. And yet it seems to be pretty damn good in practice.