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Between Google, Microsoft, and Apple, it's easy to find alternatives that offer free tiers with more storage than Dropbox. Alternatively, those of us around here should probably be switching to things like ownCloud or NextCloud*.

*Without stepping into the politics and history of what's gone on between the two, the short version is that NextCloud is a fork of ownCloud after ownCloud decided to switch to offering a free, open source version for personal use and a closed, paid version with more features for enterprise. Some of the ownCloud people didn't like that, so they forked it and started NextCloud. Both are regularly updated, and I have yet to actually use either so I can't recommend one, but I'm guessing I'll eventually set up NextCloud for myself.

Unless...you educate your children, and provide them with devices - and the knowledge to use them - that enable them to securely share notes, pictures etc.
It makes them more productive and ready for more advanced environments later.

If you're here, you're a nerd with your own private server(s) - start with this:
https://nextcloud.com/

Sorry for replying this late. Just in case you find back here, too:

My impression is (not from own experience, though, but from what I read) that Nextcloud has become quite mature these days. As I haven't made the comparison myself, I cannot really say whether I'm actually using anything that's not available (or not available freely) in ownCloud. One significant difference is that all Nextcloud components are freely available under GNU AGPLv3. Here's a rather detailed comparison from last year.

Nextcloud cannot quite be used as a "drop-in replacement", but there's a migration tool that supports ownCloud 8.2 to 10.

What I found a bit demanding was the bare metal setup which requires a (nearly) untouched, freshly installed server Linux, in my case Ubuntu Server (while there are other installation paths I have no experience with).

You can rather easily host an instance of Nextcloud on rather modest hardware in my experience. It just needs to be able to run apache/nginx, php, and sqlite (you're supposed to use mariadb/mysql but don't absolutely need to if you're just running it for yourself). Activate the tasks app and you're good to go. The entire infrastructure is all open source and you get a whole lot more benefits than just self-hosted tasks.

Everything is accessible with CalDAV so you can use the built-in sync from the iPhone or DAVdroid and OpenTasks on Android. For desktop/laptop you can access it from the web interface or through your preferred groupware software.

Since security is an issue, if you don't want to pay for an SSL certificate you can self-sign one or get one from Let's Encrypt.

You can rather easily host an instance of Nextcloud on rather modest hardware in my experience. It just needs to be able to run apache/nginx, php, and sqlite (you're supposed to use mariadb/mysql but don't absolutely need to if you're just running it for yourself). Activate the tasks app and you're good to go. The entire infrastructure is all open source and you get a whole lot more benefits than just self-hosted tasks.

Everything is accessible with CalDAV so you can use the built-in sync from the iPhone or DAVdroid and OpenTasks on Android. For desktop/laptop you can access it from the web interface or through your preferred groupware software.

Since security is an issue, if you don't want to pay for an SSL certificate you can self-sign one or get one from Let's Encrypt.

AFAIK, OwnCloud was forked by the original developers, after some policy disagreements with greedy investors. I was skeptical, but after listening to a FLOSS weekly pod-cast about nextcloud, I'm actually quite exited about the project. The version of OwnCloud shipped with Debian stable has been rock solid to me for years. For hosted OwnCloud, there are many alternatives: https://owncloud.org/providers.... The same goes for nextcloud: https://nextcloud.com/provider.... Thunderbird works well with standard IMAP servers.

Not if your files are continually synced across all devices, and backed up in the "cloud".

I use Nextcloud, personally.