In this article package, I'll explain the pros and cons of moving aspects of your digital life to the cloud, and I'll discuss the very best free and paid cloud-based services for storage, security, entertainment, communications, finance, productivity, and more. Click the links to the right to get started.

If you're asking whether you can really trust cloud services with your data, we like the way you think. Regarding any online service with a healthy dose of skepticism will generally serve you well. As with most things in the tech world, make compromises between security and convenience.

To keep your data secure, you want to protect your files from prying eyes while also preventing them from being lost or inadvertently destroyed. Those two objectives aren't mutually exclusive, but can often seem that way.

If your primary concern is making sure that nobody but you ever sees your data, the cloud may not be for you. While most reputable cloud services offer strong guarantees that your data will be heavily encrypted and that no one inside the company has direct access to your files, you can never be 100 percent certain that something won't go wrong.