How to liberate your laptop: The definitive guide • Hacker News Board

Post by simonblack » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 9:56 PM UTC

In the beginning I thought all I had to do was move my files to a cloud provider that is not Apple or Google. There are plenty of end-to-end encrypted apps to choose from. Or are there?

Why do you need a third-party cloud provider?

What's wrong with hosting your own 'cloud provider'?

Back in 2011 while travelling overseas away from home, I lost a lot of files from both my home computer and from my laptop due to a misconfigured DropBox installation.

I realised then, and later, that anything stored in the cloud does not belong to you at all, it exists only because of the goodwill of a third party. And that goodwill can disappear at any time at all, without notice.

The only way to ensure that those files belong to you is to host them yourself.