How reliable is Livejournal?

Factual Questions
1

Many of us are familiar with Livejournal, a website where you can create an online journal that your friends can read. But you can also create private entries that only you can read. Questions:

  1. Assuming that nobody is going to figure out or guess my password because I’ve used a completely unguessable combination of letters and numbers*, how hard would it be for someone else to gain access to one of my private (or friends-only) entries?

  2. What are the chances of some or all of my entries being lost due to some sort of server failure at Livejournal? (I know that I could recover them from Google’s caches, but Google doesn’t seem to have found me quite yet.)

*I haven’t, but just for sake of argument…

2

  1. If your email address or an email address you’ve used in the past with your LiveJournal account isn’t secure, someone could obtain your password that way. If you read or type private entries on a computer that is in some way not secure, someone could see private entries that way. Your friends only entries are only as secure as your choice of friends (are these people really who they say they are?) and as secure as THEIR journals. I worked for LJ for a time (abuse team) and saw lots of taken-over accounts. All that I saw could be traced to some error by the user - terrible passwords, insecure email accounts, remaining logged in on an unsecure computer, falling for phishing schemes, stuff like that. But that was some time ago, I’m not really in the loop right now. There was one meme a while back that posted an entry in your journal if you were logged in, but that was all it did.

  2. I trust it. There were some comments lost for a while during the early years, if I remember correctly, but they were eventually restored. If you intend to write really important things, though, the backup function is there for a reason. Local copies are important!

3

I didn’t even know there was a backup feature. Thank you. I think I’ll go make up a better password now, BTW.