11–20 of 158 posts
All the benefits of "cloud", but you know where your data is. Do remember to make backups, but you need those for commercial services as well.
Security: with local storage it's on you to make sure that your NAS or whatever is constantly up-to-date with security patches. And that's assuming your NAS provider keeps providing patches. It's on you to do all necessary monitoring for intrusion detection etc. Reliability: with local storage it's on you to keep backups, make sure those backups work, replace failing drives, don't accidentally wipe the drive, and mak…
With cloud storage it's still on you to keep backups, never forget that.
First, the cloud company may spontaneously lock you out forever with no recourse. You better have backups.
Even if that doesn't happen, they might lose your data. If you are a personal (non-commercial) account you very likely don't have any SLAs, so anything can happen. Even on commercial accounts, SLAs ultimately only provide liability, not a guarantee of service.
So it's always on you to have backups.
> a one-time payment for an external hard drive may be a more economical alternative over time. If you care about your data, you are playing with fire. Drives do not store data forever. Data must be read and rewritten occasionally to maintain it, from old media past its lifespan to new media. Good storage software, with the ability to write your data with either mirroring or striping of some sort is able to routinely…
Run your own cloud (specifically OwnCloud). The setup takes effort, but afterwards it's easy. I run it on a microserver at home, with port forwarding for access. All the benefits of "cloud", but you know where your data is. Do remember to make backups, but you need those for commercial services as well.
For NAS, I am running Windows Server 2022 (I have a rational reason for this). It hosts many things.
* IIS, for my local browser start pages, I configure with "new tab redirect" plugins
* JellyFin - Basically a personal Netflix for all my ripped media
* DokuWiki, thumbdrive version - for documenting house stuff
* Twonky - Because it's the least-bad DLNA solution I've used so far
* NGINX - provides public reverse proxy function for Jellyfin
I have a backup script which backs up the most critical documents (taxes, work code, personal writings) up to S3 and Azure - pennies a month. I have all my stuff on mirrored drives locally.
I have been mulling over burning MDISC discs for my larger media (personal photos, video, etc.), and doing something with that. This is partly aspirational - Once-a-year MDISC burning for stuff could be cool, but where do I store those when safety deposit boxes are becoming more and more rare?
Photos sync'd from phone to laptop making pics taken instantly available to share via desktop apps. Also add in the NAS and you have three copies before you consider RAID or BTRFS or anything.
Replace Dropbox with syncthing and you have multiple folders and can choose which folders go to which devices.
Put a NAS at a second location and you have the ability to power up and power down the remote NAS whenever you want to make a backup and syncthing will handle the rest.
Add in any one of the UIs over the files on the NAS and you replace most of the household use of things like Google files or drive.
About the only thing I would like and don't have, is syncthing with an object storage backend for cloud based folders fully under your control.
> a one-time payment for an external hard drive may be a more economical alternative over time. If you care about your data, you are playing with fire. Drives do not store data forever. Data must be read and rewritten occasionally to maintain it, from old media past its lifespan to new media. Good storage software, with the ability to write your data with either mirroring or striping of some sort is able to routinely…
I have used local drives for my data for decades. I have data since 1995. Nowadays I also have a remote offline backup somewhere. It seems to work for me so far.
aka "making sure you're not hosed if a drive goes bad"
I don't disagree with the premise, but the author's case is deeply flawed. > Instead of paying a monthly subscription to store and access your files, a one-time payment for an external hard drive may be a more economical alternative over time. Cloud storage has much, much more redundancy than a single external hard drive, and the author discounts the value of that redundancy. > Reliable access Have fun getting grandm…
Syncthing is a dream. Photos sync'd from phone to laptop making pics taken instantly available to share via desktop apps. Also add in the NAS and you have three copies before you consider RAID or BTRFS or anything. Replace Dropbox with syncthing and you have multiple folders and can choose which folders go to which devices. Put a NAS at a second location and you have the ability to power up and power down the remote…