The Cloud. It's probably tech's biggest and best marketing gimmick. It soothes you with the assurance that your data is safe and stored away in some secure location just waiting for you to access it from any of your devices. But the truth is by being in the "Cloud" your stuff can be just about anywhere from a data center in Mesa to a converted cargo ship sailing in the Indian Ocean connected to the internet by dozens of Starlink modules. "The Cloud" gives tech companies a lot of wiggle room, and that's not good when you need to know where your data is and to keep control of it.
So, just like anything it means more work for you to track where your data is, how to access it, and back it up so you don't lose it. The good news is that it's not that difficult, but takes effort. Here are a few tips to get you started:
Take an Inventory of Your Accounts We all have at least one DropBox account, but know that if you have a Gmail address you also have Google Drive. If you use Office... or Microsoft 365, you may have files on OneDrive. How these files are kept depends on each setting at each service. The best thing is to login to each via your web browser and see what data is stored. Maybe you don't want it anymore. Or maybe you want to download it so that it gets backed up to Time Machine, which I hope you all are using. You may even want to delete or close those accounts. The most important thing here is to take an active inventory of what you have stored other places then your computer and figure out if you want to continue storing the data in the cloud, saving locally, or deleting.
Check Out Your Email Accounts Email is no longer just email. It is contacts, calendars, and sometimes notes, too. You can be syncing contacts to an old work email, or your calendar to a Gmail you don't recall the password to. The process is the same as above: login to the accounts via your web browser and see what is up there. Then you can take action to export contacts, move calendars, or save notes offline.
Don't Forget About Photos Apple Photos is the default for saving pictures, but you also may have content on Google Photos, DropBox, or even Adobe's cloud servers. Just open your web browser and login to see if there is any content up there. Downloading into your Apple Photos is a way to preserve them in your ecosystem.
Once you have a handle on where your data lives and how to access it, creating a plan goes a long way to ensure that you don't fall into the void that is the "Cloud" and keep access to the stuff that is most important to you. | 
