Does anyone use the cloud for storage? About 10 years ago a friend of mine said that the cloud was the future and I didn't believe him but now I do. It's prevalent! We use it at work to access client resources and it's faster than server based sites.
I use it for sharing files but not for personal storage. There are several reasons for this.
1. Storage space is cheap, I've got 1TB in my laptop, 3TB in external pocket sized drives and another 3TB in my desktop. My desk is littered with USB sticks containing anything from 16-128GB each. I don't need someone else's online storage to top it up. My phone has a 32GB card in it (soon to be upgraded); my tablet has 64GB.
2. If I want files with me I want them now. If they are small files they can fit on local storage and if they are not I don't want to be paying through the nose to download them when I'm on the move.
3. I want to know exactly who has access to my files. I don't want to put my proprietary materials online when I have no idea who has access to them. I have a couple of heavily protected (password protected and encrypted) Excel files on the cloud because they are shared but anything else of any importance stays local.
4. I want to know the files will be there when I need them. I know my local drives could fail (which is why I have multiple drives) but I don't know when a network issue might mean I can't get at my cloud storage.
5. I don't want to find I have to pay to get at my own files. When I got my tablet it came with a Dropbox bonus which meant I had 50GB of free storage. 23 month later I started getting emails that my free bonus was coming to an end and it would cost me $100/year to keep it. I use less then 500MB of Dropbox storage so I could ignore them, but clearly what they want to do is get people using it so they just pay the bill because it's easier than worrying about it.
