The short answer is “yes”. There are parts of the cloud you should take advantage of, and there are aspects of the cloud you should dodge. The trick is knowing which is which and finding the right tools and services for your needs.

I’m all for uploading my music to the cloud so I can access it from any device. However, I also want it local because I want to be able to listen to my music even if the Internet isn’t available.

I think that storing and sharing photos online is awesome. However, I don’t trust Flickr,or Picasa, or Facebook, or any other site or service enough to trust it as the only repository for irreplaceable family memories. I want those pictures stored redundantly on multiple services, and a local copy just in case.

Things like email, word processing, personal finance, and even project management are all available as cloud-based services. In many cases they lack features you might find on locally-installed equivalents, but they also come with benefits and advantages you don’t have when your software is tethered to a single PC. You have to weigh those pros and cons out and decide what works.

When it comes to smartphones and tablets—as well as the exploding ultrabook market—the cloud is essentially a requirement. My Dell XPS M1330 laptop has a 500GB hard drive, but my MacBook Air only has a 128GB SSD, and my iPad and iPhone each have a relatively meager 16GB of local storage capacity.