While cloud-based backups are inexpensive (as little as $5 or $10 a month) and make mobile computing easier, it’s still a very good idea to have a local drive for dedicated storage. You can restore a toasted computer from a local drive more quickly and with less hassle. But also consider this: You don’t just use storage drives for backup. You use them to hold movies, music, working files, and other things that just make more sense to keep within reach. It’s a pain to stream a movie you’ve stashed in the cloud when you could just load it from a USB drive sitting next to your computer.