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I agree with you in principle, but then we're giving up the redundancy and safety offered by multiple data centers. The cost also comes down at cloud scale so t

I agree with you in principle, but then we're giving up the redundancy and safety offered by multiple data centers. The cost also comes down at cloud scale so that you're only paying a few dollars a month instead of large up front purchases. There's also a technical hurtle for the average person. Are they going to manually sync all their data from devices every time?

nvahalik 8y ago
Somewhat. There are (were?) some companies trying to break into a personal cloud (WD MyCloud) and I think companies like Buffalo and Synology are making it a lot easier to spend $500-600 and be able to reasonably protect your data from pretty much everything but fire (though, you can buy hard drives that claim fire protection, too). But at a deeper level, we claim that we want to store and keep all this data but do we need to? Really? I mean, back before digital photos, I took some (but not a lot) physical photos. They were dear to me. Still are. But now I have so many photos that I hardly ever look at them except for maybe a few that I've explicitly put into albums. A lot of them never get used. Perhaps even then we don't really need to protect all of it—if it was important to us then perhaps we really should think about how we'd protect it just like we'd protect those old photo albums that people leave with during hurricanes/flooding.
- kaxline 8y ago
  My thinking is that you just don't know what will be important to you in the future. Those photos probably weren't that important to you when they were first taken, but now they are. I would advise that everyone store even the seemingly most trivial piece of data. There could be an algorithm in the future for which that is the missing key. I trust in our inability to predict the future more than our ability to predict it.
SamPatt 8y ago
Syncthing is a great free tool. So is FreeNAS. Definitely not for mainstream users though.

nvahalik 8y ago

Somewhat. There are (were?) some companies trying to break into a personal cloud (WD MyCloud) and I think companies like Buffalo and Synology are making it a lot easier to spend $500-600 and be able to reasonably protect your data from pretty much everything but fire (though, you can buy hard drives that claim fire protection, too). But at a deeper level, we claim that we want to store and keep all this data but do we need to? Really? I mean, back before digital photos, I took some (but not a lot) physical photos. They were dear to me. Still are. But now I have so many photos that I hardly ever look at them except for maybe a few that I've explicitly put into albums. A lot of them never get used. Perhaps even then we don't really need to protect all of it—if it was important to us then perhaps we really should think about how we'd protect it just like we'd protect those old photo albums that people leave with during hurricanes/flooding.

kaxline 8y ago
My thinking is that you just don't know what will be important to you in the future. Those photos probably weren't that important to you when they were first taken, but now they are. I would advise that everyone store even the seemingly most trivial piece of data. There could be an algorithm in the future for which that is the missing key. I trust in our inability to predict the future more than our ability to predict it.

SamPatt 8y ago

Syncthing is a great free tool. So is FreeNAS. Definitely not for mainstream users though.