The words duh, and backup both came to mind when reading this article. When I do computer repair, I always carry 2 verified copies of all my softwAre tools on two different mediums. With a file like this, why wouldn't you verify it before the event, and bring the file multiple ways- mesh, email, flash drive and cd?
While I understand something like real backups would have helped this guy, to someone not intimate with the technology, Live Mesh looks like something that replicates your files on many places, something that sounds similar to backups.
I keep my important stuff versioned on subversion, running off a ZFS RAID-Z with weekly snapshots and daily diffs shipped to a different machine on a different site. If something goes wrong with the backups, I get texted in minutes.
I hope to be able to migrate that to BtrFS someday. Will take some work.
Like the article says, backup fails always seem obvious in retrospect. But Mesh has an implied continuous backup component to it. It replicates files, and should do so only in an old->new way. Therefore it is a backup. It isn't as complete as a VCS would be, but should be very sufficient for the intended purpose.
