Can you Depend on Cloud Solutions?

Cloud solutions are great. They usually are free, or pretty inexpensive for what you get. However you do give the company access to your data which is how they are making money most of the time. But my point of this post isn't too discuss the nuances of how the companies make money or whether you should give the companies your data for free in exchange for a useful tool. My point is should you even depend on them? Most of them are touting themselves as more reliable than your desktop and your own backup system. It's true that the best backup is the one that you do, but you also have to be able to get to your data. Obviously the choice depends on what you are putting into the cloud because of reliability of the service and the sensitive nature of the data.

If you are a student writing a term paper for instance, Google Drive, Apple iCloud, or Microsoft office 365 are all free and are very compelling. However OpenOffice and Apple Pages are also free, and if something goes wrong your term paper won't be bit dust.

What made me think of this is Apple just rolled out iOS 8, and in doing so upgraded iCloud to iCloud Drive. Brilliant because now it's more on par with Google Drive, however the fine print says that when upgrading to iCloud dries only iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite support iCloud Drive. Only developers are running Yosemite so this seems like a rather odd thing to do. So until Yosemite is out I guess I won't be using iCloud.