I agree with many points of the article. I am slowly moving back from cloud-based services to simple local (though synced) text-based files. E.g. I switched fro

I agree with many points of the article. I am slowly moving back from cloud-based services to simple local (though synced) text-based files. E.g. I switched from Google Mail to plain IMAP, which I fetch with isync, read with mutt(-kz) and index with notmuch. I generally do not do presentations and documents in Google Drive of Microsoft Office anymore. When possible, I stick to Markdown and use pandoc to convert to PDF. Since it's plain files, it is easy to backup. And git provides excellent versioning. Most people can also read and write Markdown without too much trouble. I also decided to move my task planning back to local, using Task Warrior and Dropbox for sync. For backups of my MacBook and Mac Mini, I am now mostly using Arq [1], which can backup to nearly anywhere (ssh to Amazon S3), and has a sensible interface. The data format is documented, and they have an open source command-line restore utility for the case Arq disappears. It can also restrict backups when connected to known Wifi networks, etc. If I wasn't on Mac, I would probably look at Attic. [1] http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/ http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/