[hot_gril]

The local files I have to care about are my photo, video, and music libraries, which sit inside Photos and Music on my Mac. Photo/video gets auto synced from my iPhone when I connect it. Code and work documents are on Github and Google Docs respectively, but if they weren't, they'd just have a folder. Photo lib is stored on a secondary SSD because my boot disk isn't that big.

Time Machine backs everything up to a local pair of HDDs. I also periodically create a read-only, encrypted disk image containing my libraries and upload that to Google Drive because I happen to have a lot of free storage there. Before I had any cloud stuff, I used to put one of the backup disks in the bank then later swap it with my other one. My wife also copies some extra special things like wedding photos to her laptop and other disks.

Lastly, some big files I care less about are basically in unorganized places, but not very many. They're either in my downloads folder or on one of the HDDs. I've got another laptop I don't use as much anymore, and my policy is that everything on there is temporary.