Don't put all your eggs into one Google account.

How much do you rely on one account? If you're like me, the answer is, "Quite a bit." Until recently, I had just one main Google account as well as a separate AdSense/AdWords Google account. That main Google account was associated with my Blogger blogs, my Gmail email, my online docs on Google Docs, my notes on Google Notebook, and more. Certainly, it is convenient to do things this way -- I haven't had to worry about multiple user names or passwords. Unfortunately, it's a bit risky to do things this way for security reasons. One compromised password could really shake your online life up very badly!

What made me change my ways was my sudden realization that I was using the same account both for my blog and to archive my blog posts. I used to blog on Blogger and store copies of my posts on Google Docs, but I've been using the same Google account to access both services. Although I also backup my blogs elsewhere, the idea that a hacker or Google glitch could take out both my blog and one of my main backups for my blog simultaneously was very upsetting. Obviously, no one ever tries to organize his or her online life in a fundamentally insecure way, but Google accounts and other single logins linked to multiple services make it very easy to focus on convenience and forget all about security. Chances are that nothing bad will ever happen to your Google account, after all, so this tradeoff might seem to be acceptable. It's still too risky for my taste, however. I've decided to change my ways, and I recommend that you do the same if you feel you are depending too much on one account.

There are two easy solutions for this problem that I have started exploring, and neither involve a tape drive. Diversification is the name of the game here. Google explicitly allows people to have multiple Google accounts. Thus, instead of having your blog, email, and docs linked to one account you could link them to two or three. This protects you quite well against hackers, but it might not effectively protect you in the case of a catastrophic Google data loss. Here is where the other giants and the rest of the Web can come to your rescue. For instance, I've decided to start using Zoho to store some of my online documents so I don't rely on Google Docs entirely. There are alternatives for almost every online task; to me, it makes perfect sense to take advantage of the Internet's awesome collection of free stuff by spreading my important online tasks across a myriad of online services. This isn't to say one shouldn't prefer one service to another -- that's human nature. Instead, what I'm arguing is that everyone should have a backup plan. Your online life is important, so why would you take it lightly? Although spreading yourself and your data too thin can have negative productivity consequences, this can be minimized if you designate one service as being preferred and others as being backups. For instance, I'm planning to continue using Google Docs more than Zoho; Docs is going to be my primary service and Zoho will be my backup. If Docs goes down or a Google account of mine gets compromised, I'll start using Zoho more. If nothing bad happens, which is likely, I'll just stick with Docs.