The short answer is more complicated than most people expect. "Trust" has multiple meanings, and cloud storage is reliable at some of them while being questionable at others.
If trust means "will my files still be there tomorrow," then yes. Major cloud providers have redundancy and durability numbers that make local drives look fragile by comparison. If trust means "will my data be treated as private and used only by me," the answer gets murkier.
The AI Training Problem
We are in the middle of an arms race between every major tech company to build large language models, image generators, and video synthesis tools. All of these systems require enormous amounts of real-world data for training. Photos, text, video, audio. The more diverse and high-quality the training data, the better the model.
So what does this have to do with your cloud storage?
When you upload files to a cloud service, you no longer have physical possession of that data. Your rights over it are governed by the terms of service, which you did not read, and which can be updated at any time, which you still will not read. Those terms may include provisions that grant the provider certain rights to your content.
Adobe updated their terms of service to include language that allows them to access content stored in their cloud for purposes including machine learning. Google, which hosts Google Docs and Google Drive, has denied using stored files for AI training, but their terms of service are broad enough to leave room for interpretation. The same ambiguity exists with Amazon, Dropbox, and most other major providers.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a business incentive problem. Companies sitting on petabytes of user-uploaded creative content have an enormous financial motivation to use that data, and the legal framework protecting users from that use is thin and evolving.
Safe From Deletion Is Not Safe
Most editors think about cloud reliability in terms of uptime and data durability. Will my files survive? As long as you pay the monthly bill, yes. The major providers replicate your data across multiple data centers. The probability of a complete data loss event on AWS S3 or Google Cloud Storage is vanishingly small.
But safe from deletion is only one component of "safe." Your footage can be intact, backed up across three continents, and fully accessible to you while also being accessible to the provider for purposes you never agreed to, or agreed to without realizing it.
What You Can Do About It
If data privacy matters to you, and for editors working with client footage under NDA it absolutely should, there are concrete steps worth taking.
Read the terms of service. At least skim the sections on content rights and data usage. If the provider reserves the right to access, analyze, or use your content for any purpose beyond storing it, that is worth knowing.
Encrypt before uploading. If your data is encrypted before it leaves your machine and only you hold the decryption key, the provider cannot use the content regardless of what their terms say. Tools like Cryptomator, rclone with crypt, and Veracrypt make this practical for large file collections.
Choose providers with strong privacy commitments. Backblaze, for example, has straightforward terms that do not include content usage provisions. Proton Drive is built around encryption. These are not the cheapest or most feature-rich options, but they trade convenience for privacy.
Be selective about what you upload. Not everything needs to live in the cloud. Camera originals for archival, yes. Client deliverables, yes. But every file you upload is a file that exists on someone else's server, governed by someone else's terms.
Reduce What You Store, Reduce What You Expose
The simplest way to limit your exposure is to limit the volume of data you are putting into third-party hands. This does not mean avoiding cloud storage entirely. It means being deliberate about what goes there.
Clip Sweeper helps with this by identifying which media files in your projects are actually in use and which are not. Stripping out unused clips, orphaned media, and regeneratable files before archiving to the cloud means you are storing less, paying less, and exposing less of your work to terms of service you did not write.
The cloud is a tool. A good one. But like any tool, it works best when you understand exactly what you are giving it.