One of the reason I decided to start this little blogging here on my personal page using Jekyll is related to data ownership. I mean that sounds really grandiose but really I’m just tired of user experience of uploading things on to other people website. There’s nothing like writing on my local text editor, and do a git push to get things up onto a server. If I want to change things? I could even rebase my commits, and change history with a force push if I feel naughty. Backups? It’s all just a bunch of text files in the git history. Doesn’t get much better than that.
I’m starting to feel this way for a lot of things, and self-hosting solutions had never seems so attractive. Honestly, if RAMs and hard disks aren’t going through a price explosion right now, I would probably have started on it already. I’ve been keeping closer eye on the development of OwnCloud, and Immich. When RAMs, and hard disks prices are reasonable again, I might just go for it, and get myself a little home server/network drive.
This post is also a little of a PSA for people who are uploading things to online services with no other backups. Always maintain your own back up. You never know what will happen to these third party service. You might wake up one day finding yourself unable to access your account, or they’re not longer offering services. You can search the news; it happens even with the biggest of brand names.
I have a local backup like system images, and an external storage I sync my files to, so I’m not entirely without any backups. However, the external drive also has old archived stuff as a singular copy. I certainly don’t have that good practice of accessible copy, an on-site backup, and an off-site backup. I would love to change that. But for now, that’s a little too expensive plan and what I’ve got is just barely enough that I’m not too worry if one of my devices go wrong.