A friend recently wanted to purchase Microsoft Office and was told that it's now only available on a yearly subscription, is that correct? Anyway, he downloaded Office to his computer and found that all the default settings for Word etc required him to use "OneDrive" storage instead of being able to save directly to his hard drives, as he had previously done. After a while, he managed to work out how to save his files directly to hard drives without using "OneDrive", but it seems that Microsoft don't really want you to do this (perhaps I'm wrong)?

I have Adobe Photoshop and this clearly and immediately gives you the option of either saving on their cloud or direct to your hard drive. But, I'm interested to know whether you use clouds to back-up your data and whether you think they're secure enough for your confidential files?

There are always reports of hackers getting into so-called secure systems, so I'm a bit hesitant to use clouds, but others I've talked to don't have any worries about the security of their cloud data. Can anyone get access to peoples' confidential files that they store on clouds, particularly if there was a legal case involving a person's online activities?

Thanks for your views on this.