I probably don't know enough about this whole cloud vs home business for my opinion to be worth anything... but that won't stop me from expressing it.

My concern over cloud storage isn't that some unauthorized person might look at it, but rather that someone other than myself is responsible for keeping it intact. I keep backups of my backups, with a copy at my neighbor's house in the next block. How secure are Google's (or Amazon's, or whoever's) data storage systems? Could someone determined enough physically destroy them? Could someone press the wrong button and accidentally erase them? I did that this morning to an email I had spent 40 minutes composing. I went to copy it to the clipboard so I could paste it into Google Translate, and for whatever reason my keyboard didn't register the "Ctrl" key, so my email was replaced by the letter "c". Before I could Ctrl-Z and undo it, Gmail auto-updated the draft.

What about speed of access? If I had to retrieve a 500MB file from the cloud, it would take me almost six minutes before I could open it, as opposed to less than three seconds when it sits on my hard drive.

I dunno... I'm uncomfortable not having direct hands-on control of my data.

tanstaafl.