Internet speeds are slow in some places, such as France (specifically the Pays de Gex near Geneva, where my parents live). My dad uses iCloud, but he drives to

Internet speeds are slow in some places, such as France (specifically the Pays de Gex near Geneva, where my parents live). My dad uses iCloud, but he drives to CERN to upload (he just retired). I have 18 TB: 5 TB Seagate (x2), 4 TB WesternDigital, 2 TB WesternDigital, and 2 TB internal. Backups take the most space - I fix laptops for friends from church, and they don't back up but still want their files to be safe. I had to shuffle some files around to free up 650 GB for a recent repair, mostly photos & videos. Virtual machines use a lot of space too. I made VMWare Fusion images of every Mac OS version 10.5-10.13, Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, 7, and 10, in several languages ( https://peterburk.github.com/i2018n https://peterburk.github.com/i2018n ), and some Linux distros. Another 1 TB is a dataset of Chinese characters from a machine learning project of mine ( https://blog.usejournal.com/making-of-a-chinese-characters-dataset-92d4065cc7cc https://blog.usejournal.com/making-of-a-chinese-characters-d... ). Music, mostly from repaired iPods back in high school, accounts for a lot as well. There's some movies too, though I missed a chance to get 2 TB from a friend because I didn't have enough space at the time. If I upload those, even those that I legally ripped from CDs & DVDs, I'm worried that it'll trigger content filters. For these, local disks are more useful than cloud services in my opinion.