I wasn't aware of that though now you come to mentuon it I do seem to recall seeing a cloud-shaped stencil in a technical drawing set or some such years ago.
I meant though that the current crop of manglers and marketroids have all seen the little magic cloud on Visio diagrams linking to off-site functionality (such as BBM servers and off-site bacup facilities) and somebody has come to the conslusion it stands for something speific. Which, as we all know, it does not since my Pi sitting at honme could be termed "cloud" just as much as Google's globe-spanning site-independant virtual data centre. So the term is meaningless.

Yes, I just didn't want to give Microsoft credit for inventing something they didn't.
I'm running owncloud at home so my little cloud qualifies as well.

It's actually extremely easy to have secure "cloud" based storage.

Have a ssh server open to the internet?
Use sshfs, or file managers connect to server options (nemo has this)
& you have desktop intergrated secure storage in your control. (pub key makes this very easy & secure)
You can even easily chroot users and use sftp so that they only have access to their own files & can't use a shell.

Of course, since most likely google will never have a hard drive fail causing lost data, I also use grive & duplicity.

Encrypted incremental backup. How do you beat that?

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So much ignorance, so little time. Sigh...

If you don't want to put your files in the 'cloud', then don't. They still sell storage media - HDDs, flash media, DVDs, all sorts of devices. It's not that difficult to set up a personal file server (your own personal cloud, if you will) and owncloud is in most repos if you want it. Nobody is forcing anyone to store their data anywhere, and if you do decide to use the cloud, it's not that difficult to encrypt it first. If the data is encrypted with your key, the server company giving the government or anyone else the data isn't a big deal. But if you're really paranoid, you certainly don't have to use the cloud at all. Buy some HDDs and put everything on them. It's not rocket science.

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The first commenters seemed to get it but hanging on to your hard-drive will fail. These later replys missed the mark.The days of available hardware are numbered... almost gone. PC's are going the way of 8 track. New software is scant. The computing industry has dropped the home computer.
If you want security on the cloud there are ways. eg. WebRoot cloud service. Security is not the problem. Ownership is the problem. Self-sufficiency. Liberty and freedom.
With the pc will go your current working software. DRM Hell.

Get ready to pay-n-pay-n-pay for what you do for free now. Oh, you can't do that without your subscription. Access denied. There's no hard-drive copy. There's no hard-drive. It's a phone.
You can not do on a phone what you can do on a PC. Computing utility is being removed from the masses, slowly. Most people don't care- never used a PC except for social communications anyway.
It may be driven by the interests of security and of course profit, but it is misguided.
So Linux, it is up to you to maintain a place for the future nerds by not abandoning the lowly pc users. But you wouldn't be relevant then would you?

Is it true that IBM went back to typewriters?

DGLx is saying similar to what I said, hardware choice is being limited. Go try to find a business quality laptop with less that 12" screen with a hdd. You can't, they all have small SSD's 128G, 256G. Those won't even hold all my pictures. They want you to store your data on "the cloud" so you can pay a subscription for the storage. I work around this by running me own cloud but the issue still exists that I can't have all my data on one small device anymore where I used to be able to go buy a 10,11" laptop with a hdd bay that I could put a big drive in.
Many say whats the big deal, store your stuff in the cloud the monthly fee isn't that much compared to buying a drive. But most don't read the TOS when the do so, your data is not backed up, no gaurentee that it will be there. The company you choose may go out of business tomorrow. Then you find that you need to subscribe to a photo sharing site, a document storage site, a bookmark sync service, a calendar service, an e-mail service, etc. eventually you have so many connections you have to manage that it becomes unmanageable.

well, I have to edit now, looks like some manufacturers are listening now. I see a Dell latitude 12 available with 500G drive. Wife and I both need new, I may just have to upgrade.

I don't see hardware being limited. Rather, I see it as a state of transition from HDD to SSD

People with VHS players would consider choice of content diminishing after a wider adoption of dvd's.

Right now, SSD's are larger for what you pay for them compared to only years ago & HDD are at the end of the road.
A 4tb HDD is only like $130.

HDD will continue to decline, SSD will continue to get larger size & cheaper.
I don't see this being bad. HDD's tend to be the weak point of any computer being the most sentimentally valuable (data) & first to go lol.

Yes, the problem is I can't fit all my data in an affordable SSD, the size I need is about 3x the cost of a HDD.