Feels like we’re just putting all our stuff out there with a bow on it for a hacker. 🤷♀️
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Safe from what?
From unexpected loss? If your data is stored on one of your local drives, then that drive could fail at any time, resulting in the permanent loss of that data. You certainly could set up local backups or a RAID array or something to mitigate that risk. But then it’s on you to keep all of that up to date and working right and restore if something does go wrong. In the cloud, you are letting somebody else who is much better at it take responsibility for keeping backups working right so your data is never inaccessible.
From being copied by hackers? Well it’s a trade-off. Your personal computer isn’t perfectly safe from hackers either – there’s plenty of malware out there meant to copy, encrypt, or steal local files. You’re probably not a very attractive target for that sort of attention though. Cloud providers are probably much more skilled than you at keeping hackers out, what with employing departments full of professional security experts, but they’re also a big juicy target. Other trade-offs include that your data probably isn’t the most interesting thing to some hacker on any particular cloud storage provider.
And what if you want to share the data with only one or a few particular people? If you email it or something, then it’s also on a cloud provider’s servers, and easy to accidentally or intentionally forward beyond what you wanted. Most proper cloud storage systems make it easier to share only with one or a few particular people. Or you could also physically hand them hardware USB drives or something, but that’s less convenient.
So there’s a lot of considerations and trade-offs depending on exactly how skilled you are and what is most important to you, but it’s not at all clear cut whether cloud storage is more or less safe than storing files locally.
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