a provocative question?

I am getting in the habit of storing much of my day-to-day
information in postgres, rather than "flat" files.
I have not had any problems of data corruption or loss,
but others have warned me against abandoning files.
I like the benefits of enforced data types, powerful searching,
data integrity, etc.
But I worry a bit about the "safety" of my data, residing
in a big scary database, instead of a simple friendly
folder-based files system.

I ran across this quote on Wikipedia at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_%28e-mail_client%29

"Text files are also much safer than databases, in that should disk
corruption occur, most of the mail is likely to be unaffected, and any
that is damaged can usually be recovered."

How naive (optimistic?) is it to think that "the database" can
replace "the filesystem"?

TJ O'Donnell
http://www.gnova.com/