When I want to find a file, or look at a picture, or play a song, I don’t want to have to first figure out which cloud it’s in. I want to be able to take advantage of integration and seamless syncing across my PC, Mac, and mobile devices, and I want it all to just work.

Each cloud storage service has pros and cons, so choosing is a subjective exercise. Music files purchased from Amazon don’t count against the capacity for Amazon Cloud, so if I bought my music from Amazon it would make sense to go with Amazon Cloud. Likewise, Google Docs files don’t count against the capacity of Google Drive, so it would make sense to choose Google Drive if I work in Google Docs a lot.

After narrowing down the choices based on the types of data I want to store in the cloud, and the unique advantages offered by some services, it comes down to dollars. The pricing of the different cloud services varies widely, but so do the options available for storage capacity. Just as an example, if I narrow the options to SkyDrive versus Google Drive, SkyDrive is less expensive for storing 50GB or 100GB, but if I need to store more than 100GB I’d have to go with Google Drive because the biggest capacity available on SkyDrive is 100GB.

The bottom line is simple, though: pick one cloud and stick with it. The simplicity and convenience is worth a few bucks.