This is the fourth post in my series called Hitting the Digital Brakes, where I explore my journey into my use of technology to ditching some aspects of it now. The first post in the series was about the joys of imperfection and in the second post I asked if we really need the latest tech. The third post was on how my e-reader made me a worse reader. And now, cloud computing. When I signed up for my first cloud account, I was so happy. I had lost several files in backup mishaps (failing Zip drives, curse those clunky things) and was happy my files "safely" lived in Dropbox (think that was my first account, at least). Ever since, most of my files lived in the cloud, even my pictures, all 50GB of that folder, last I counted. That's changed now. A lot. Now, my only cloud account has about 8gb in it, maybe even less One of the things that triggered it this change was, of course, the onslaught of AI. I really didn't want my files on a server that might be used as training data (and fearing someone already did). And then I thought back to the times before I used clouds. Yes, I lost files, sometimes a couple days of work. Back then the hard drives were crashy, though and that changed. But I had a bigger thought: what's worse, the chance of losing a couple days of work? Or giving all my data to a US company to do goodness knows what with it? (insert random mutterings on the techindustry here) I got to work, I created a NextCloud server, and I thought good and hard: what did I need to have access to everywhere, and what could live only on my laptop? That "need this" collection ended up to be 8GB. I could whittle it down more, but this felt right. My photos are in the Pictures folder on my laptop and aren't in the cloud anymore, other than the newest that I auto-upload to Nextcloud before moving them to the Pictures folder. My carefully curated mp3 collection is in the music folder and on my tiny music player. The only thing I sync are my most important docs are in Nextcloud. And that's it. I did add something important to my maintenance routine, of course. I make weekly backups, more if needed, if I add a lot of pictures for instance. I have several backup drives and a second laptop that I copy the files to. One of my backup drives is a fancy USB drive that I could bring with me if I leave the house. I never do, though 😀️ And what if everything fails all at once? What if the house burns down? Then the house burns down. I will have way more to worry about than pictures when that happens. At least I know then, that all my most important files are safe in the cloud of my choosing.