Good news for Twitter users: you can now download every nugget of wit and wisdom you've ever posted to the service.
I've already downloaded mine, and it's brilliant.
Know where your exits are
The problem with sharing your stuff online is that things change - so for example Instagram changed its Terms of Service this week, upsetting many, and services such as Facebook appear to change their T&Cs every other login.
If you decide that you don't like the changes, or if the service is taken over by someone you don't approve of, or if you just prefer a newer competitor, then moving your stuff from one service to another shouldn't be an enormous hassle.
There's another reason you might want to have a copy of your stuff: backup. It's rare, but online services can and do mess up, so the occasional big download can give you peace of mind.
Credit where credit's due here: the likes of Google and Facebook make it easy to get your stuff back from their services, and that's particularly useful if you use them to store and share your photos. Other services such as Flickr and Instagram are a bit less helpful, although third parties have stepped in to provide the download features they lack.
As long as you use someone else's products to store your content, there's the possibility that one day they will turn round and do something appalling or annoying, or just fail to keep up with the rest of the planet - so what looks perfectly fine today could become perfectly awful six weeks, six months or six weeks down the line.
When you're storing stuff on other people's services, don't just look at how easy it is to upload and share your stuff. Look at how easy it is to get it all back again.
