The storing and protecting of your personal data is something you should take seriously. Computer professionals talk about the CIA triad when storing data. There are three elements of the CIA triad: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Confidentiality means that only the people you want have access to the data. Integrity means that the data has not been altered. Availability means you can access the data when you want to access it.
For different types of data some of these elements are more important than others. For family photos integrity is very important, you do not want the photos files being corrupted. Availability may or may not be very important to you. You may be willing to go to the garage and find the box that has dvds of your photos or you may require that you can instantly access the photos when you choose. You may or may not care if your photos are confidential (private). If you are more concerned with being able to share the photos with others (availability) than making sure that only people you want can access the photos (confidentiality), you may feel comfortable with a cloud based (Internet remote server) solution where your photos are stored on the Internet and a simple URL is shared to allow access to the photos. If privacy is more important to you you may want to store the photos locally on an encrypted drive so only you have access to the photos.
Availability and Integrity can be increased by making multiple copies of the data. If a photo gets corrupted you will still have a copy of it that is good (Integrity). If one of the photos gets deleted you will still have availability, by accessing the copy. Multiple copies can negatively affect confidentiality since there are now several different files that can be misplaced.
You may choose to store some of you data in the cloud, since you always want to have access to it. Cloud storage generally requires ongoing expense, so other data you may choose to store locally. Looking at these three elements and how they are important to you can help you make the right choice when storing data.