Earlier, people used to carry their documents on floppy discs, gradually people switched to memory sticks, and now a few are turning to the cloud.

Cloud computing means the facility to access, alter and interact with information on any platform with a net connection, including that on smartphones.

No software purchase and installation are needed for these online services and most run through a browser. Users can choose from the increasing number of cloud-based offerings, like Google Docs and Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Another system dubbed Evernote, where different pieces of data, like webpages, business cards and text notes can be composed into virtual and searchable notebooks.

Phil Libin, Evernote's boss, stated, "Premium users have all of their data go over SSL [encryption], kind of like an online banking site. Free users currently are sending data back and forth just over http - the standard way that the web operates".

According to Adam Gross, Senior Vice President of Marketing for the storage service, cloud needs the trust of users. While Mike Elgan from Computerworld. com cautioned customers against being too trusting.

Contrasting Dropbox and Evernote, some services do not coordinate information to private computers and are based exclusively in the cloud.

Critics recommend students to think about the physical location of their work, matters over possession, and the increasing costs for accessing it.