Increasingly there has been a shift away from devices that have capability of a ton of local storage but rely on internet connectivity. Tablets, Chromebooks, etc. Some of these devices are replaced every two years like mobile phones. Cloud storage is one way to address backing up information; I can replace my phone whenever, but my Google account has all my contacts, email, and photos (if I choose that setting) stored.
Local backups are great, but 1)most people don't do it or do it regularly enough to be effective; 2)a backup drive stored in the same house as the computer is subject to all the things that could happen to the PC. Theft, fire, disaster, hard drive crash. Also dumping data onto another drive and deleting the original is not a backup.
There are basically two different cloud type services; something like Carbonite intended to serve as a continual offsite backup for all your files, and something like Photobucket, designed to store one type of file like photos.
Also, there is an entertainment industry attempt, as well as a generational trend to shift consumption of content, particularly music, from locally stored digital files to a service (Netflix, Spotify, Pandora) that streams access to the entertainment, never allowing you to 'own' the files to begin with. The obvious downsides are continual cost and the possiblilty the specific content can be removed from the service at any time due to rights/licensing issues.
