Cloud Conundrums

It’s always an outstanding question to me about what cloud provider to use if any. If you’ve read my previous post, you know that I’ve recently migrated to an Apple device. Thus the temptation exists to move all of my files to iCloud. The prices are cheap, I don’t have to own the servers, what’s not to like? Still, that’s no guarantee of anything. Apple, like anyone else, has to answer to legal inquiries and they still have the decryption keys.

Of course if you’re the target of an ongoing FBI investigation, then no cloud is going to be safe and you should probably not break the law on someone else’s property. Putting that aside, there’s still a possibility that your account could get shut off if the host does not like the content of your files. In my head, Google is an especially bad actor in the space of privacy and Apple might be too much of a walled garden so who does that leave? Microsoft of course with their OneDrive product. After all, its tightly integrated into Windows and very useful if you have a personal Microsoft 365 account. This doesn’t mean you can’t get totally owned by them though. As evidenced by this story floating around that Microsoft is banning accounts with lude material being hosted, even if that content is legal. The blog post’s concern is substantiated by this reference to the code of conduct, section 3a.

All of these findings are pretty disheartening. All of this leads me back to hosting my own Nextcloud instance. Which, I highly recommend if you have the technical know-how and comfort to run your own Linux servers, nowadays its even more trivial to configure with snap packages on Ubuntu. I was simply hoping to minimize my footprint on the internet and have one less surface area to secure against outside threats.

At any rate, I need to come up with a solution to backup my most important files at some point, a decision will be forthcoming.