Then, last month, the site's owners announced the unthinkable: they were closing down the site. What first looked like a cruel April Fool's joke became real when the management slipped in the crucial details: ''If you have uploaded files, images or posted blogs, or if you would like to download some of your favourite files, please take this opportunity to download them before March 30th when the site will be suspended.''

The announcement presented users with a huge challenge they had just five days to grab an enormous 48 terabytes of information stored on the site.

Almost immediately, plans swung into action. Overseen largely by a group of former Filefront staff members, copies of the site's vast archives were painstakingly made.

Although initial progress seemed slow, within a few days the team said they had successfully copied most of the information and were getting ready to shift it elsewhere. ''We're good,'' one Australia-based user said, before another said, ''Filefront is dead''.

But while Filefront's story is a great example of how an online community was able to save itself from destruction, it is also a lesson in the potential dangers of storing lots of valuable information online.

Cloud computing has become one of the great online trends: just look at the virtually unlimited storage offered by Gmail and Yahoo Mail, for example.

But while many of us opt for the convenience of using cloud services and storing information on the internet, we remain largely oblivious to the problems that could be caused if that data becomes unavailable. Earlier this year, Gmail users around the world gnashed their teeth when the service went down for a few hours, but few quit or chose to back up emails instead. Ceding responsibility to the cloud is a problem that was highlighted last year by the free software advocate Richard Stallman, who stirred up controversy when he said that cloud computing was a dangerous trap that took away users' control of their data.