Attracting and keeping traditional couch potatoes in portals is an attempt to generate large audiences by spoon feeding them all they need in one place. The sites can be personalized for individual interests. This is still a very fluid situation as sites continuously improve. It is the Holy Grail for media companies trying to salvage their dwindling passive TV audiences. Their lemming-like management is frequently mesmerized by hifalutin terms.
New portals keep going public with lofty stock prices and big losses.
It is a high stakes battle for market share, without a solid and rational foundation. I've had a Colorado backup tape drive since I purchased my computer, and have experienced failures. Your statement about only backing up data and software patches caught my eye. I read somewhere that it's not a good idea to have your backup spread across more than one piece of media. By default, in Microsoft Office, it is all dumped into the My Documents folder.