Yeah. Clouds are physical storage indeed. But it doesn't appear physical storage to a person using it. Do I have to mention how many times I, my friends, relatives or collagues have lost their thumb drives, SD cards or any other physical object for that matter? Cloud services are indeed more convininet and secure in these scenarios.
Yeah. Many of us may have data we would not like to give someone else acces to. However, If somebody really wants your data. He/she will find a way no matter what. And I believe that in future we will have more secure and more personal cloud storages available for us. If you are that worried about your data being in cloud, you can just start walking around wearing tin foil hat all the times.
You are hundreds of times more likely to lost data on your external drive than from Dropbox, Google Drive etc. No matter how you try to think about it.
Like i said earlier, using clouds provided by companies isnt the best solution. There is just a new news about ms shrinking their cloud, onedrive, from 15gb to 5gb and no 15gb camera roll anymore. If you have bought 100/200gb plans, they are cut off too.. And then you have 90 days time to decide what to do with onedrive and will you accept the new policies... I got earlier the same kind of message from google that some bonus space, 10gb (ftom installing an app? Or did it came wih an android phone?) is going to end and if i want to continue using it, i need buy a plan...
and with google drive i lost all data at once, but luckily i was backed up my gdrive to my nas earlier. I lost only couple of files. And how did it happen? I was using my own laptop but logged in as a differend user, i needed to access to google drive to store some large files and i opened the gdrive software installed to my computer. It asked me to give the username and password, but then it didnt sync the data from the cloud but it erased the cloud because the just created gdrive directory on my laptop was empty. You needed only a one user error(?) and the whole cloud drive was deleted. 10gigs of my work files!
I dont need a tin foil hat because nowadays im using my own encrypted nas. And rather than playing and paying for only few gigs i have space for terabytes of data... I do agree about using and losting usb/sdcards/etc. But im sure these same people would lost their heads if they werent attached to their body. The main problem of clouds are that they are slow and you are 24hours dependent on internet access and the service provider. What happens if you need some files from the cloud drive and you get a message "maintenance is going" or at home you lost your internet connection...
Im sure too that in the future everything is in clouds - a good money cow...