Your brain is full of spiders, You've got garlic in your soul, Mr. SC...

[RichS]

I use both. I back up to the cloud every time I do anything major, and I back up my files to a thumb drive on a regular basis as well.

That's one part of knowledge that's been drilled since I started tech; for critical data, have one copy onsite (home), and one offsite (work, the cloud, etc.) for just the reasons you mentioned. Plus, a good cloud service is going to have hundreds, if not thousands of servers to keep your data safe.

[Nunavut Pants]

... [The cloud is] nothing more than a bunch of servers. Servers, which do require maintenance, and *can* fail.

True, but it depends immensely on the provider. Many of the more reputable providers will have significant redundancy such that if a server goes down there is a pretty smooth transition to a fail-over server. And storage is pretty much always redundant, most often with multiple redundancy.

That's generally a lot more reliable than a single server somewhere. Granted, nothing is perfect, but the provider's whole business model is to provide servers. If they eff that up, there's no reason for them to exist!