There’s usually a moment like a price hike, a privacy scare, or just one too many “your storage is almost full” notifications that pushes you off a cloud service and onto something you actually control at home.
I’m ashamed to say I STILL have not added a NAS solution to my homelab. I wrote about Immich and I do plan to use it at somepoint.
Google Photos and iCloud storage have me by the neck!
How about you? Have you been able to pull the plug on paying for cloud storage? And what did you replace it with?
Hyper-active security at one of the cloud providers caused me to dump cloud storage.
After I changed my ISP to T-Mobile’s Home WiFi, one of the cloud providers I was using decided that they had to lock me out of my account for a month before they would allow me to get back to my data.
I had all the data stored with that service backed up locally. So when they contacted me to reactivate my account, I told them the relationship was over.
Frankly, though, I’m super-paranoid about using cloud storage for anything other than music files - even if it is the “easiest” way to share the draft of a project proposal or MBA capstone project. I keep copies of super-important documents on at least one - and often two - USB flash drives. I back up files to external SSD drives - the precursor to an NAS solution, I suppose. And since I have several computers, I will copy super-important files to at least one other machine.
Not on MY watch! That’s my data, and if I don’t have 100% access to it, you may as well delete it; I wouldn’t keep that provider and I’d do more than that! I’d tell everyone I know about that service and recommend that they steer clear of it or if they use it to CHANGE to something else!
I have always been wary of cloud storage…paid or otherwise. Everything I uploaded used file-based encryption before I let them see it. Looking back over the past couple of decades, I think I was making a mistake using cloud storage at all. With the Snowden revelations, surveillance capitalism, and overt spying on the people, I see no excuse for using cloud storage other than a race to the bottom.
It’s hard to stop the electronic steamroller of progress…much less slow it down…unless you own a lot of shares of the offending company and are good at being an activist shareholder.
That has not stopped me from telling others that I know who use this company’s products and services to be very wary of what they store.
