We live in interesting times. Huge tech corporations invest billions of currency units into training glorified IF statements to do things and for that they need your holiday photos. One of the reasons I created this website was to have my own safe harbour for my content in case of this or that corporation deeming my voice and my ways of expression non-monetizable. I did not expect that over time that might lead to all data being ingested by power hungry black boxes. I am of course far from believing that this place is immune from creepy crawly internet bots devouring data, but legally they can’t do it without my permission.
Anyway, the whole point of this preamble is to underline that it is now more than ever very important to keep your data safe and far away from the grabby hands of multi-billion corporations. This is why I doubled down on my private NAS setup, which evolved significantly over the last couple of months.
I work in IT as you might have already figured out and one of my colleagues who used to work on a very advanced storage solution in a very prominent company in the sector once told me that with everything being moved to the cloud it is more and more important to have your own storage. And also that being in the storage business is a good thing since that’s something that will never stop being useful. It is important to remember, that there is no ‘cloud’, it’s someone else’s computer. So it is vitally important to have your data on a machine you control. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use google drive or Microsoft Onedrive or Dropbox, but be aware of three very important facts. First is that if it’s in the cloud, it’s on their servers covered by their TOS, and if they say “we use your data to do X now” there’s very little you can do about it. The second thing is that it is still more reliable to have your data mirrored on your own hard drive in a box under your desk, than counting that it will always be there on a server in who-knows-where. You can always take your hard drive with you, you can’t always count on your account/credentials/internet access. The third thing is that if it’s out there, it needs to travel over the internet, and while it’s usually safe, it’s never completely safe.