I use dropbox, google drive, flickr, amazon, skydrive all for various things. It's out of control!

So far, it's been determined by what type of files I want to store and what I want to do with them (backup/archive, remote play).

Music - Amazon & iTunes

Photos - Flickr/picasa

General backup/accessibility - dropbox/google drive/skydrive

As a note, I pay for the majority of the above services for storage.

What systems do you use to store your files?

Pretty much just Evernote (paid.) Most everything else is local. I have things on iCloud and other services but nothing I really rely on.

Do you back up local to an external hard drive?

I backup locally but I like to have access to some files, particularly music on my android. I have music stored in the Amazon player as well as the google music play system. I have iTunes locally as well. I really think I need to do some research and comparisons to choose one and roll with it.

Pictures are another issue. I've played with Picasa and flickr. I just want a place to store/organize/share pics with friends and family.

Other data files, I prefer to keep local unless it is something I'd like to share. google docs has worked ok here.

Pictures is a funny one because Picasa doesn't really exist anymore -- Google rolled it into Google+.

I say it's a funny one because you avoided the most popular solution: stick em in Facebook, which let's face it, sucks for everything except pictures and chat.

Flickr seems like a decent solution but it's a pain to maintain.

I still prefer to keep it all local, then download a small subset to whichever device I want to carry with me.

I treat my music the same way -- download a small subset to my device -- though with Pandora and Spotify (or whichever streaming music service you like) that provides a nice alternative.

Dropbox. Great company. Wonderful customer service. Never in a million years would I trust google when the chips are down; they'd give me some automated form that would take 10 days to turn around and get a response.

You've been in touch with Dropbox customer service?

Yup, multiple times. For team account and prior. When stuff goes wrong with google, I get help forums and forms. Dropbox are really snappy about responses, usually within a couple hours (business hours; not sure about non-business hours).

I haven't known anything to go wrong with Dropbox, and with Google I've only had something go wrong once, and it resolved itself in a few days.

Eric, what strikes me about your storage is that you're paying a half dozen companies: Amazon, Apple, Flickr, Dropbox, and Google. Fascinating.

I'm the opposite. I have a local RAID backup on Time Machine that runs regularly.

I let my Flickr Pro expire, I refuse to use iCloud, and I don't want to pay for Dropbox.

I think Cloud Storage is ridiculously expensive and needs to come down a lot in price before I'd consider it.

I'm also annoyed that iPad and iPhone aren't available with more than 64Gb.

FIX IT FIX IT IX IT FIX IT FIX IT!

They really should have a micro SD slot. Maybe next versions.

But then they can't sell you skus with bigger hard drives and it neuters iCloud... I'd be surprised if they do until the market forces them to.

Well then I hope the market price forces them to, because I really don't like iCloud as a solution until it gets significantly bigger in allowed storage and significantly reduced in price.