For a few years I had everything synced to the cloud — documents, photos, code, notes, random downloads I'd never look at again. It felt tidy. One subscription, files available everywhere, nothing to think about.
Then the subscription price went up, twice in eighteen months. And I started paying closer attention to what I actually needed synced versus what I was just leaving there out of habit. The answer, it turned out, was a lot less than I thought.
When I made a list, it was short: a folder of current work documents, a folder of reference materials I look at regularly, and my password manager database. That's basically it. Everything else — old projects, archives, photos from years ago — I never access on the go. I access it maybe once every few months, sitting at my desk.
The cloud storage subscription was solving a problem I didn't really have, for the majority of what I was storing.
For the small set of files I genuinely need on multiple devices, I set up a simple sync solution that runs on a spare machine at home. Setup took an afternoon. It's been running for about eight months without any issues I had to deal with. The files I actually care about are synced. Everything else lives on an external drive that I back up periodically.
Photos are the one area where I kept a cloud backup, because losing photos feels worse than losing documents. But I stopped using the cloud service as the primary way I look at photos — that happens locally.
Honestly, not much. There have been two or three times where I wanted a file that was on my home machine and I was somewhere else. Both times I was able to either get it another way or just wait until I was home. The convenience I thought I was giving up turned out to be mostly theoretical.
The thing I didn't expect to gain was a clearer sense of what I actually have and where it is. When your files are spread across a cloud drive you're paying for, local storage, and whatever syncs automatically, it's hard to know what's where. Having a simpler setup forced me to actually organize things, which I should have done earlier.
Probably not. If you work across multiple locations constantly, or collaborate with others, or just don't want to think about it, cloud storage is a reasonable choice. I'm not making a general argument against it. I'm just noting that for my specific situation, I was paying for more than I needed, and simplifying worked out fine.