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The usual argument for using "cloud" over managing your own files/data is that it's very hard to safely manage your own data without making mistakes (data loss,

The usual argument for using "cloud" over managing your own files/data is that it's very hard to safely manage your own data without making mistakes (data loss, etc). However, this is an example of how companies like Google also make mistakes. Furthermore, when Google/FB makes a mistake (like leaking your private data) they do it at a global scale. I offboarded myself from all of Google's services a while ago, but I also think "cloud" is dead, at least in the cases where the cloud service holds the encryption keys on my behalf. I don't trust, and never will trust, any company to hold on to my data without either selling it to a third party or accidentally leaking it.

jimbob45 7y ago
What do you use for email over Gmail?
- brenden2 7y ago
  I use fastmail. I'm a happy customer.
  - PunchTornado 7y ago
    It seems from another world when I see people paying with money for products. I don't know why, maybe because I'm very cheap, but I'd never do this when I can pay with my data.
  - beckler 7y ago
    Didn't Australia like pass a bill or something that compels corporations like Fastmail to give the government any and all encrypted communications if they ask?
    - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
      This is one of those stories that had no relevance in actuality, yet gets brought up in nearly every single mention of Fastmail: The bill applied to a requirement for backdoors/the ability to decrypt data. Fastmail was never E2E encrypted in the first place (like Gmail, Outlook, and most other major mail providers), and hence, Fastmail was always required to comply with lawful requests for your data.
      - jammygit 7y ago
        It’s always relevant because the world has a good idea how the Australia treats data privacy and security. Their elected officials are shooting their tech sector in the gut
- swiley 7y ago
  Opensmtpd is very easy to set up.
- jkaunisv1 7y ago
  I used Fastmail until they randomly deleted a large chunk of my emails and the support followup was abysmal (one email a day around 4am EST) with no ability to recover, explanation or apology on their part. It was the push I needed to set up a Mailinabox instance. It was a breeze to install and has been working great since I spun it up four months ago.
  - ghostpepper 7y ago
    As a recent convert from gmail to fastmail, this scares the hell out of me. How long did this go on before you pulled the plug? I am not Australian/located in Australia so I would have about as much recourse with fastmail as I would with google (ie. none).
    - jkaunisv1 7y ago
      Emails were deleted August 23rd, across a wide variety of folders, all at the same millisecond (when I later pointed this out and how difficult it would be for me to do this accidentally, they did not comment). Noticed on October 4th. I'd noticed some emails weren't turning up in searches but I chalked it up to my bad memory until there was one I knew for a fact should have been there. It was Oct 22nd by the time we got to any sort of conclusion, which was basically "there's nothing we can do for stuff that far back but I'll try to restore any recently deleted emails we can find". Getting details/logs/info from their support, even after they escalated to a higher level, was like pulling teeth. They restored a bunch of things I'd actually deleted but they were all stuck in Draft mode, took till Oct 31st for them to sort-of fix that mess. I set up the Mailinabox somewhere in that period. I still have my fastmail account because I wanted some overlap to test the MIAB before committing, and I'm getting ready to fully pull the plug before my next billing cycle. It was a good lesson in setting up regular backups and not trusting any provider. I found Fastmail great to use until that experience, and I could see them being useful as a relay to send through trusted servers, but not worth my money to deal with the terrible support.
      - avtar 7y ago
        This is really unfortunate. I've been using Fastmail alongside Gmail and thought about switching over completely to the former at some point, just haven't come around to doing so yet. I'm glad you shared these details -- always good to know how organizations respond when things don't go as planned, as opposed to what's stated in their marketing materials.
- hatch_q 7y ago
  tutanota here. It's pretty good and cheap - except missing ICS import/export for calendar which is annoying.
- Daniel_sk 7y ago
  Fastmail.
- cyphar 7y ago
  Not OP, but I use Mailbox.org. They have a neat feature where you can give them one or more PGP public keys and they encrypt the bodies of all plaintext emails to those keys. It's not perfect (you're still trusting them to not be compromised) but it means even if your account gets taken over, your email history remains private.
- ulfw 7y ago
  Microsoft Exchange Online. $4/month for Exchange push email to my iPhone/iPad/Apple Mail(our Outlook). 50 GB of mailbox storage. Not blocked by anyone as it's a legit provider. Have been using it for years with my own domain.
- balladeer 7y ago
  Mailbox.
- Phrenzy 7y ago
  Runbox.com
gman83 7y ago
Google Photos is pretty great though. My use case for it is that even though it's private, I assume that any photo on there could become public.
- brenden2 7y ago
  I, too, was a fan of Google Photos in the early days. But I've decided that privacy is more important than the convenience of its syncing feature. You never know how that data might come back and bite you in the future. I have an iPhone but I don't use iCloud's backup or sync feature either, I just store my photos locally. I backup my iPhone to my iMac, and I backup my iMac to my Synology NAS in my closet. I try to keep my private data private.
  - surge 7y ago
    One of the favorite features I have of the Plex Server, is that the Plex app will automatically back up photos on your phone to your Plex server, which can run on Synology as well (mine's on an ODroid HC connected up to a multi-TB drive with backup drive).
    - syntheticnature 7y ago
      As someone for whom this was a bridge too far, thanks for the information. This is a useful alternative to pull it local and still get the syncing that was the reason I let Google photos mostly do as it pleased after I got a Pixel.
    - jammygit 7y ago
      Our Plex AppleTV app has begun aggressively pushing its own content lately. It’s a nuisance to navigate to where our personal content is now
  - chooseaname 7y ago
    I've submitted a feature request to the Photos app team for syncing to a network share as an alternative to iCloud. The Files app recently got network share support so here's to fingers crossed that Photos can get it too. Edit: I want Photos app to have this feature. Other apps can do it on iOS but they have to play location services shenanigans to get it to work in the background and I don't do that. The Photos app has special abilities.
kop316 7y ago
I would like to say that Nextcloud, while it is not trvial to set up, is very very good at helping you set up the server securely. They additionally have a way to testing your server to make sure you did set it up, and helps you to correct issues. I would love to see Nextcloud create a "time machine" type box, where it runs both as your router and as a "home cloud" service. That way it would be much easier to configure it as a public facing service.
- brenden2 7y ago
  I haven't used Nextcloud, but I'm excited about a future of Notcloud products.
- cyphar 7y ago
  The only problem is that the server is written in PHP, which has had a history of bad RCE bugs (and an RCE bug in this context means all your personal data is accessible). In addition, NextCloud has had several pretty bad bugs related to authentication (such as bypassing 2FA, by pressing "cancel"). Don't get me wrong, I still use NextCloud, but you can only access my instance through a VPN (or by being on my home network where my server runs). I would suggest that everyone else does the same if you're hosting your own data.
  - kop316 7y ago
    Do you recall which RCE bug and when? I have been using it for 4 years, and I recall one in the past year, but Nextcloud was loud and clear on making sure you had to upgrade. It was even nicer with auto updating on Debian, I didn't have to do anything to get my server patched (I just went in to confirm it was patched).
    - cyphar 7y ago
      [1] shows 143 code execution CVEs in the past 20 years. Now, to be fair, this site has been known to misclassify bugs in the past and it's likely that most of those bugs don't apply to NextCloud or weren't even RCEs. However it's hardly unheard of for PHP to have RCEs. Usually the RCEs are in programs written in PHP, but PHP itself is hardly blameless. For comparison, Python has had 5-10 code execution CVEs in the past 10 years. And again, I'm not bashing PHP or NextCloud here. I would probably also firewall NextCloud if it was written in Python. The only thing protecting your data from being public is a single service that you are running and gated by a basic login form -- I personally feel much safer with it behind a WireGuard VPN. [1]: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/128/PHP-PHP.html?vendor_id=74 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/128/PHP-PHP.html?vendor_i...
pgt 7y ago
What did you replace Gmail and GDocs with? I've successfully moved to Firefox and DuckDuckGo, but am struggling to get off Docs and Gmail.
- brenden2 7y ago
  Fastmail for mail, and I use git for most document-type storage. If I absolutely need a spreadsheet, I just use Apple's Numbers which is mostly crap, but good enough.
  - Daniel_sk 7y ago
    Another vote for Fastmail. They also have a very simple one-button import option for your gmail emails. The web UI is fast and simple. I love it. I tried ProtonMail, but there are numerous drawbacks because of full E2E (Must use their email clients on mobile, web client on web and bridge on desktop. Migration from ProtonMail requires to use their beta software. Full text search doesn’t exist - yet).
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      Another vote for Fastmail!
  - jammygit 7y ago
    Fastmail is good but I bet the Australian government is vacuuming up everything you send/receive. I’m considering ProtonMail again now that there is calendar
- msh 7y ago
  Word online is free.
crazygringo 7y ago
Everybody makes mistakes and nothing in the world is black and white. The only question is, is your cloud provider less likely to make mistakes with your data than you are? For most people, the answer is going to be orders of magnitude less likely.
- chenning 7y ago
  this
- Kaiyou 7y ago
  Just encrypt your data before putting it onto somebody else's computer a.k.a. the cloud.
  - colejohnson66 7y ago
    And when the average user forgets their password?
    - jliptzin 7y ago
      Don’t be the average user.
      - colejohnson66 7y ago
        That’s a very dismissive attitude. If you want to make the world a better place, you have to accommodate the average user; One can’t say, “you’re not smart enough for our service.”
        jliptzin 7y ago
        If you’re serious about the security of your data, you need to know how to pick a password you will remember. There are things in this world that we ask of average people that are far more difficult. In 2020, picking and remembering a password should be table stakes at this point. It’s not 1997 anymore.
victords 7y ago
That’s a well known fact and they even promise 99.9X uptime in their service. The usual argument is that Google is less likely to make mistakes than the average Joe managing his own infrastructure.
- compiler-guy 7y ago
  Google introduces a different set of risks and failure modes. It may shut down the service you are relying on. It may lock you out of your account for confusing reasons. Which isn't to say that you shouldn't use it, just that you are exposing yourself to different risks, and you should take steps to mitigate those risks. Primarily by duplicating your data other places.
thedance 7y ago
I get an absolutely endless parade of other people's data to my gmail account. Doctors send me MRI scans. Bankers send me foreclosure notices. Airlines send me tickets. Undertakers send me condolences. The preponderance of evidence suggests that relying on individual vigilance on a large scale does not work as well as relying on the vigilance of large organizations.
- dyingkneepad 7y ago
  Your experience is far different than mine. In 15 years I only got probably like 2 accidental emails. Is your email something like john@gmail.com?
  - wccrawford 7y ago
    I'm somewhere in-between your experience and the parent's. I've had 2-3 instances where it appears that someone put my email address on their account by accident, and I got their auto insurance claims, etc. There was no "click here to verify this is your address" email sent for those. I also got a lot of email for a high school reunion where the school was named after someone who shares my name... And people routinely left off the numbers in the email address, ending up with mine. The rest of the not-mine emails all look like phishing attempts to me, and not just mistakes made by some office worker.
  - msh 7y ago
    I have firstname + two letters @gmail which rarely gets wrong email but then back from the nineties got firstnamelastname @ Hotmail.com which properly get at least one misdirected mail a month.
  - trequartista 7y ago
    My email is firstname.lastname@gmail.com. Both my first and last names are not super common, but off-late I'm seeing multiple people with the same combination when I google my name. I get bank statements from 3 different banks, job offers and even the occasional nude selfie - all intended for someone else. I have tried to reply, click on unsubscribe links - but nothing seems to work. It stops for a few days and it starts again.
pergadad 7y ago
But if I host myself I have to trust both my own IT skills and the one FOSS maintainer that provides the software...
balladeer 7y ago
I use Restic Backup to backup to a supported object storage and now setting up another provider (or VPS which will be slightly tricky) via Borg Backup (for the same data). The most important of that (~1GB) gets backed up to Tarsnap too. And once copy gets backed up to my local hard disk. Once a while if I have to share any photos with some friends I send them an iCloud link and then remove the photos once they have either downloaded or seen. I know there's a risk of losing the data if I forget/misplace the key(s) and my hard disk dies (at the same time) but then I could forget my Google credentials too, or worse still (with a higher probability) I could get locked out of my Google A/c and I don't know any Googler, neither do I have too many Twitter followers. It's been worth it and once setup it's been running smoothly for over a year (across 2 laptop changes/data migration).
zubspace 7y ago
For consumer products, the cloud makes perfect sense. Scaling, performance and orchestration make it a perfect fit. And who cares about the few things that fall into wrong hands here and there... Our business, on the other hand, works closely with government agencies, insurance companies and similar institutions, and the cloud is an absolute no-go. All sensitive data on-premise on the intranet. No need for change. I believe many people are not aware yet, that things in the cloud cannot be controlled, or they consciously accepted that. Many companies won't take this risk.
- compiler-guy 7y ago
  > And who cares about the few things that fall into wrong hands here and there... I surely hope you are not in charge of any consumer-facing cloud storage products. Everyone cares.
tantalor 7y ago
It's not "dead" if everybody but you still uses it.
danielrhodes 7y ago
> I don't trust, and never will trust, any company to hold on to my data without either selling it to a third party or accidentally leaking it. This is a very black and white way of looking at trust. Trust is earned, it can be broken, it can be rebuilt. All human relationships are built upon trust, and it is fallible just like anything else. To have trust is to create vulnerability. However, just as you mention, that vulnerability comes with an upside. What you are saying is: because there is vulnerability in trust, you should trust no one.
- oarsinsync 7y ago
  > All human relationships are built upon trust Relationships with corporations are not the same as human relationships. Being open with other humans is part of the human experience. Being open with special legal entities that we have fabricated as societies for economic gain is justifiably questionable.
  - dhimes 7y ago
    Even so, I'm not convinced that trust can be completely rebuilt. Maybe it varies with the person, even in human relationships.
- throwaway789394 7y ago
  Or why trust someone if you don’t have to. Why do we have locks on doors and store passwords as hashed strings? Trust sucks.
- rapind 7y ago
  Most direct human to human relationships don't come with a 40 page privacy policy and terms of use that they reserve the right to change on a dime. A rational stance is not to trust anyone that requires you to agree to a bunch of legalese without having a lawyer review it first.

jimbob45 7y ago

What do you use for email over Gmail?

brenden2 7y ago
I use fastmail. I'm a happy customer.
- PunchTornado 7y ago
  It seems from another world when I see people paying with money for products. I don't know why, maybe because I'm very cheap, but I'd never do this when I can pay with my data.
- beckler 7y ago
  Didn't Australia like pass a bill or something that compels corporations like Fastmail to give the government any and all encrypted communications if they ask?
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    This is one of those stories that had no relevance in actuality, yet gets brought up in nearly every single mention of Fastmail: The bill applied to a requirement for backdoors/the ability to decrypt data. Fastmail was never E2E encrypted in the first place (like Gmail, Outlook, and most other major mail providers), and hence, Fastmail was always required to comply with lawful requests for your data.
    - jammygit 7y ago
      It’s always relevant because the world has a good idea how the Australia treats data privacy and security. Their elected officials are shooting their tech sector in the gut
swiley 7y ago
Opensmtpd is very easy to set up.
jkaunisv1 7y ago
I used Fastmail until they randomly deleted a large chunk of my emails and the support followup was abysmal (one email a day around 4am EST) with no ability to recover, explanation or apology on their part. It was the push I needed to set up a Mailinabox instance. It was a breeze to install and has been working great since I spun it up four months ago.
- ghostpepper 7y ago
  As a recent convert from gmail to fastmail, this scares the hell out of me. How long did this go on before you pulled the plug? I am not Australian/located in Australia so I would have about as much recourse with fastmail as I would with google (ie. none).
  - jkaunisv1 7y ago
    Emails were deleted August 23rd, across a wide variety of folders, all at the same millisecond (when I later pointed this out and how difficult it would be for me to do this accidentally, they did not comment). Noticed on October 4th. I'd noticed some emails weren't turning up in searches but I chalked it up to my bad memory until there was one I knew for a fact should have been there. It was Oct 22nd by the time we got to any sort of conclusion, which was basically "there's nothing we can do for stuff that far back but I'll try to restore any recently deleted emails we can find". Getting details/logs/info from their support, even after they escalated to a higher level, was like pulling teeth. They restored a bunch of things I'd actually deleted but they were all stuck in Draft mode, took till Oct 31st for them to sort-of fix that mess. I set up the Mailinabox somewhere in that period. I still have my fastmail account because I wanted some overlap to test the MIAB before committing, and I'm getting ready to fully pull the plug before my next billing cycle. It was a good lesson in setting up regular backups and not trusting any provider. I found Fastmail great to use until that experience, and I could see them being useful as a relay to send through trusted servers, but not worth my money to deal with the terrible support.
    - avtar 7y ago
      This is really unfortunate. I've been using Fastmail alongside Gmail and thought about switching over completely to the former at some point, just haven't come around to doing so yet. I'm glad you shared these details -- always good to know how organizations respond when things don't go as planned, as opposed to what's stated in their marketing materials.
hatch_q 7y ago
tutanota here. It's pretty good and cheap - except missing ICS import/export for calendar which is annoying.
Daniel_sk 7y ago
Fastmail.
cyphar 7y ago
Not OP, but I use Mailbox.org. They have a neat feature where you can give them one or more PGP public keys and they encrypt the bodies of all plaintext emails to those keys. It's not perfect (you're still trusting them to not be compromised) but it means even if your account gets taken over, your email history remains private.
ulfw 7y ago
Microsoft Exchange Online. $4/month for Exchange push email to my iPhone/iPad/Apple Mail(our Outlook). 50 GB of mailbox storage. Not blocked by anyone as it's a legit provider. Have been using it for years with my own domain.
balladeer 7y ago
Mailbox.
Phrenzy 7y ago
Runbox.com

gman83 7y ago

Google Photos is pretty great though. My use case for it is that even though it's private, I assume that any photo on there could become public.

brenden2 7y ago
I, too, was a fan of Google Photos in the early days. But I've decided that privacy is more important than the convenience of its syncing feature. You never know how that data might come back and bite you in the future. I have an iPhone but I don't use iCloud's backup or sync feature either, I just store my photos locally. I backup my iPhone to my iMac, and I backup my iMac to my Synology NAS in my closet. I try to keep my private data private.
- surge 7y ago
  One of the favorite features I have of the Plex Server, is that the Plex app will automatically back up photos on your phone to your Plex server, which can run on Synology as well (mine's on an ODroid HC connected up to a multi-TB drive with backup drive).
  - syntheticnature 7y ago
    As someone for whom this was a bridge too far, thanks for the information. This is a useful alternative to pull it local and still get the syncing that was the reason I let Google photos mostly do as it pleased after I got a Pixel.
  - jammygit 7y ago
    Our Plex AppleTV app has begun aggressively pushing its own content lately. It’s a nuisance to navigate to where our personal content is now
- chooseaname 7y ago
  I've submitted a feature request to the Photos app team for syncing to a network share as an alternative to iCloud. The Files app recently got network share support so here's to fingers crossed that Photos can get it too. Edit: I want Photos app to have this feature. Other apps can do it on iOS but they have to play location services shenanigans to get it to work in the background and I don't do that. The Photos app has special abilities.

kop316 7y ago

I would like to say that Nextcloud, while it is not trvial to set up, is very very good at helping you set up the server securely. They additionally have a way to testing your server to make sure you did set it up, and helps you to correct issues. I would love to see Nextcloud create a "time machine" type box, where it runs both as your router and as a "home cloud" service. That way it would be much easier to configure it as a public facing service.

brenden2 7y ago
I haven't used Nextcloud, but I'm excited about a future of Notcloud products.
cyphar 7y ago
The only problem is that the server is written in PHP, which has had a history of bad RCE bugs (and an RCE bug in this context means all your personal data is accessible). In addition, NextCloud has had several pretty bad bugs related to authentication (such as bypassing 2FA, by pressing "cancel"). Don't get me wrong, I still use NextCloud, but you can only access my instance through a VPN (or by being on my home network where my server runs). I would suggest that everyone else does the same if you're hosting your own data.
- kop316 7y ago
  Do you recall which RCE bug and when? I have been using it for 4 years, and I recall one in the past year, but Nextcloud was loud and clear on making sure you had to upgrade. It was even nicer with auto updating on Debian, I didn't have to do anything to get my server patched (I just went in to confirm it was patched).
  - cyphar 7y ago
    [1] shows 143 code execution CVEs in the past 20 years. Now, to be fair, this site has been known to misclassify bugs in the past and it's likely that most of those bugs don't apply to NextCloud or weren't even RCEs. However it's hardly unheard of for PHP to have RCEs. Usually the RCEs are in programs written in PHP, but PHP itself is hardly blameless. For comparison, Python has had 5-10 code execution CVEs in the past 10 years. And again, I'm not bashing PHP or NextCloud here. I would probably also firewall NextCloud if it was written in Python. The only thing protecting your data from being public is a single service that you are running and gated by a basic login form -- I personally feel much safer with it behind a WireGuard VPN. [1]: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/128/PHP-PHP.html?vendor_id=74 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/128/PHP-PHP.html?vendor_i...

pgt 7y ago

What did you replace Gmail and GDocs with? I've successfully moved to Firefox and DuckDuckGo, but am struggling to get off Docs and Gmail.

brenden2 7y ago
Fastmail for mail, and I use git for most document-type storage. If I absolutely need a spreadsheet, I just use Apple's Numbers which is mostly crap, but good enough.
- Daniel_sk 7y ago
  Another vote for Fastmail. They also have a very simple one-button import option for your gmail emails. The web UI is fast and simple. I love it. I tried ProtonMail, but there are numerous drawbacks because of full E2E (Must use their email clients on mobile, web client on web and bridge on desktop. Migration from ProtonMail requires to use their beta software. Full text search doesn’t exist - yet).
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Another vote for Fastmail!
- jammygit 7y ago
  Fastmail is good but I bet the Australian government is vacuuming up everything you send/receive. I’m considering ProtonMail again now that there is calendar
msh 7y ago
Word online is free.

crazygringo 7y ago

Everybody makes mistakes and nothing in the world is black and white. The only question is, is your cloud provider less likely to make mistakes with your data than you are? For most people, the answer is going to be orders of magnitude less likely.

chenning 7y ago
this
Kaiyou 7y ago
Just encrypt your data before putting it onto somebody else's computer a.k.a. the cloud.
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  And when the average user forgets their password?
  - jliptzin 7y ago
    Don’t be the average user.
    - colejohnson66 7y ago
      That’s a very dismissive attitude. If you want to make the world a better place, you have to accommodate the average user; One can’t say, “you’re not smart enough for our service.”
      - jliptzin 7y ago
        If you’re serious about the security of your data, you need to know how to pick a password you will remember. There are things in this world that we ask of average people that are far more difficult. In 2020, picking and remembering a password should be table stakes at this point. It’s not 1997 anymore.

victords 7y ago

That’s a well known fact and they even promise 99.9X uptime in their service. The usual argument is that Google is less likely to make mistakes than the average Joe managing his own infrastructure.

compiler-guy 7y ago
Google introduces a different set of risks and failure modes. It may shut down the service you are relying on. It may lock you out of your account for confusing reasons. Which isn't to say that you shouldn't use it, just that you are exposing yourself to different risks, and you should take steps to mitigate those risks. Primarily by duplicating your data other places.

thedance 7y ago

I get an absolutely endless parade of other people's data to my gmail account. Doctors send me MRI scans. Bankers send me foreclosure notices. Airlines send me tickets. Undertakers send me condolences. The preponderance of evidence suggests that relying on individual vigilance on a large scale does not work as well as relying on the vigilance of large organizations.

dyingkneepad 7y ago
Your experience is far different than mine. In 15 years I only got probably like 2 accidental emails. Is your email something like john@gmail.com?
- wccrawford 7y ago
  I'm somewhere in-between your experience and the parent's. I've had 2-3 instances where it appears that someone put my email address on their account by accident, and I got their auto insurance claims, etc. There was no "click here to verify this is your address" email sent for those. I also got a lot of email for a high school reunion where the school was named after someone who shares my name... And people routinely left off the numbers in the email address, ending up with mine. The rest of the not-mine emails all look like phishing attempts to me, and not just mistakes made by some office worker.
- msh 7y ago
  I have firstname + two letters @gmail which rarely gets wrong email but then back from the nineties got firstnamelastname @ Hotmail.com which properly get at least one misdirected mail a month.
- trequartista 7y ago
  My email is firstname.lastname@gmail.com. Both my first and last names are not super common, but off-late I'm seeing multiple people with the same combination when I google my name. I get bank statements from 3 different banks, job offers and even the occasional nude selfie - all intended for someone else. I have tried to reply, click on unsubscribe links - but nothing seems to work. It stops for a few days and it starts again.

pergadad 7y ago

But if I host myself I have to trust both my own IT skills and the one FOSS maintainer that provides the software...

balladeer 7y ago

I use Restic Backup to backup to a supported object storage and now setting up another provider (or VPS which will be slightly tricky) via Borg Backup (for the same data). The most important of that (~1GB) gets backed up to Tarsnap too. And once copy gets backed up to my local hard disk. Once a while if I have to share any photos with some friends I send them an iCloud link and then remove the photos once they have either downloaded or seen. I know there's a risk of losing the data if I forget/misplace the key(s) and my hard disk dies (at the same time) but then I could forget my Google credentials too, or worse still (with a higher probability) I could get locked out of my Google A/c and I don't know any Googler, neither do I have too many Twitter followers. It's been worth it and once setup it's been running smoothly for over a year (across 2 laptop changes/data migration).

zubspace 7y ago

For consumer products, the cloud makes perfect sense. Scaling, performance and orchestration make it a perfect fit. And who cares about the few things that fall into wrong hands here and there... Our business, on the other hand, works closely with government agencies, insurance companies and similar institutions, and the cloud is an absolute no-go. All sensitive data on-premise on the intranet. No need for change. I believe many people are not aware yet, that things in the cloud cannot be controlled, or they consciously accepted that. Many companies won't take this risk.

compiler-guy 7y ago
> And who cares about the few things that fall into wrong hands here and there... I surely hope you are not in charge of any consumer-facing cloud storage products. Everyone cares.

tantalor 7y ago

It's not "dead" if everybody but you still uses it.

danielrhodes 7y ago

> I don't trust, and never will trust, any company to hold on to my data without either selling it to a third party or accidentally leaking it. This is a very black and white way of looking at trust. Trust is earned, it can be broken, it can be rebuilt. All human relationships are built upon trust, and it is fallible just like anything else. To have trust is to create vulnerability. However, just as you mention, that vulnerability comes with an upside. What you are saying is: because there is vulnerability in trust, you should trust no one.

oarsinsync 7y ago
> All human relationships are built upon trust Relationships with corporations are not the same as human relationships. Being open with other humans is part of the human experience. Being open with special legal entities that we have fabricated as societies for economic gain is justifiably questionable.
- dhimes 7y ago
  Even so, I'm not convinced that trust can be completely rebuilt. Maybe it varies with the person, even in human relationships.
throwaway789394 7y ago
Or why trust someone if you don’t have to. Why do we have locks on doors and store passwords as hashed strings? Trust sucks.
rapind 7y ago
Most direct human to human relationships don't come with a 40 page privacy policy and terms of use that they reserve the right to change on a dime. A rational stance is not to trust anyone that requires you to agree to a bunch of legalese without having a lawyer review it first.