[SmokeAndMirrors]

I use Dropbox, mostly for school and journalism stuff. I've got it synced up between my desktop, netbook, and phone. It works great and it has made my life drastically easier.

But I do not now, and probably will not ever, use it for personal files. Sorry, but I don't trust any cloud, even one I'm running myself, with that kind of information. That stuff lives offline, on my external harddrive.

I also back up everything on Dropbox on my external HDD, with the rest of my backups. While Dropbox is a great convenience, like you said, it is an external service and it could go down at any time. So I make sure that should that happen, I have all my content stored elsewhere.

For me, a cloud service will never replace physical backups. That's just asking for trouble. The cloud's primary purpose in my life is to smooth out my work-flow.