So, if you’ve seen my blog post from yesterday, you’ve learned that I am feeling deeply betrayed by Apple, and them moving to the Google Cloud for their iCloud services. This shook me to the very core, and I already made my contingency plan of moving all my content off of the Google servers.
Leaving iCloud is another way of remaining Google Free. Apart from Apple having security issues with their cloud, there are far more concerning things that damage and erode our privacy. We need to take a firm stand and say: Enough!
The only way that Apple is going to listen is if we cut them down where it hurts: in their pocket books. I am not going to reward Google by giving them my business, not even through the intermediary. So Apple iCloud will kiss my ass Goodbye.
This is a pretty tough move to make, considering that I did use Apple Email (very convenient), and I did use iCloud Library for all my pictures. Now all of that business will move elsewhere, and all of it will start with making a backup of all my photos.
Current candidate for my data seems to be Dropbox, and judging by how my new setup is becoming platform agnostic, and judging by their business model, I am starting to believe that it could be a longer term solution for my hosting needs.
Dropbox is platform agnostic, as my use case is becoming, and paying an extra $10–15 a month for a piece of mind is kinda priceless. The second important thing is that my first desktop after 10 years of not buying a PC is acting like a server. So I am thinking of accessing the files primarily locally.
Other contender for my data backup is definitively Mega from Kim Dot Com. I’ll be testing these two extensively in the next couple of days, and I’ll let you know how it pans out. Think that the biggest battle that I’ll be waging here will revolve around photography, and email will come right after. Going Google Free isn’t as hard as I thought yesterday. Think that the biggest part of my revolution was the fact that I would have to put myself through the harassment.
And finally, moving partially away from the Cloud
Since I’ve got hacked, I’ve started getting cautious about keeping “everything” I’ve got on the phone. Just because I can have EVERYTHING, doesn’t mean that I should. I am seriously reconsidering my data integrity and what is located where. Things need to be organized and make sense to you. You shouldn’t risk your data falling in the wrong hands, hence having contingency plan is always a good step to take.
I was never fond of having online backups, and I intend to keep it that way. Most of my files I will store on the local backups, as opposed to having them in some honey pot clouds, that are screaming to get hacked.
Ultimately: Own your own server is the ultimate destination where I am headed, and it seems that it will definitively be the direction in which I will be going in the following years. But in the meantime, it will be okay to store stuff on servers that we didn’t build…
