Gmail accidentally resetting accounts, years of correspondence vanish into the cloud?

Googles GMail has become very unreliable the last few days as emails correspondents are missing from Inboxes.  We are all buying into Cloud computing and the Software as a Service market, but we however are unaware of if our data is being handled with care?  Google says that the issue “affects less than .29% of the Google Mail user base and that “engineers are working to fix the issue right now, and that missing messages will be restored as soon as possible”

Bit of a large glitch for a very large pioneer of the internet, many of which would call a school boy error.

So if you have GMail or use Google Apps we would recommend a backup of your most important emails/documents once in a while.