I'm a big cloud services user. I have cloud storage accounts with a net of nearly 100GB of free space. I use a lot of the space for archives, but lately I've been using Google Drive to keep my school documents available no matter I am. And today that system failed.
Early this morning, apparently before a major Google services outage, I had saved a document I needed to print for a class later in the evening. When I got the school, and opened up my browser with the intention of printing the document, I discovered I couldn't get to Google Drive. So no homework. It was frustrating. Class started in a few minutes and I would have to turn in a late assignment because of this failure, and the failure wasn't all Google.
Luckily I had the original still in a Word document, and I was able to print it out and failure averted. But what if I didn't have a second copy? So now, I need to back up my cloud storage in multiple places in case one is off line. That seems redundant and painful.
It's also a lesson in why local applications can be important. About a month ago I removed all the cloud storage apps I had on my main machine. Dropbox, Box, SkyDrive, Google Drive, and a few more. Each of these has a cached version of my file on the local hard drive. But my thought was why do I need a local copy. The whole reason for cloud storage is so I can get it off my local storage and free up space for things, like movies.
The dilemma then is are you willing to keep cached versions of files on your local system or totally trust that the files will be available 24-7.
You could write a recipe on If This Then That (IFTTT) that copies from one service to another. But that seems so backwards and broken.
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