It was a joke, although there was another HN posting recently about a big "personal homepage" site going down without warning or backups. Apparently a lot of people really lost their content for good, and for some reason Google cache and internet archive couldn't help.
Also, hard drive recovery services already exist and cost serious money. I don't think it would necessarily be evil to charge quite a bit for backing up internet content. After all, the costs for doing the backing up are probably significant.
Just speculating, but the "some reason" you speak of may have been for private or friends-only articles. Unless everything you published was visible to the googlebots, you were pretty much screwed when JournalSpace went away. :'(
Looks like somebody's bought it now though, and hopefully have designs on getting it going again. I meant to follow the auction more closely, but does anybody know what it actually sold for?
Also, hard drive recovery services already exist and cost serious money. I don't think it would necessarily be evil to charge quite a bit for backing up internet content. After all, the costs for doing the backing up are probably significant.