Our data reflects our creativity energy, and it seems much more comfortable for many of us to be in charge of our own fates rather than entrusting it to a third party who simply sees us a profit centre. Some of us simply prefer to have control of our own destiny, without a dependence on, for example, file or data storage formats and practices that are completely opaque to them. Some people sensibly prefer to manage their own, or institution-specific, solutions on the infrastructure of their choosing, in a way that doesn't tie anyone into paying ever increasing amounts for data storage as the volumes increase perpetually, month on month. so ones use of those services has a magnifying effect on the loss of privacy and control. More-over, often if you want to share your data with others, they have to log into the same service, and accept the service's terms and conditions (usually substantially constraining the user's normal rights and freedoms, although who actually reads those, eh?!) in order to do so. Only a browser is required, and no other software needs to be installed.īut what about people who don't want to entrust all of their data to foreign corporations, holding their data in foreign jurisdiction, in formats that may or may not be retrievable in the event that the supplier fails or changes "strategic direction"? And many of these services involve "mining" their data to extract useful information that vendors sell to others to help them advertise to us in a more targeted way. Similarly the collaborative editing of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in the browser, pioneered by Etherpad, but then adopted in a big way by Google Docs (and more recently, Microsoft Office 365), has revolutionised collective note taking, document preparation, and ease of access to these powerful tools by the mainstream of computer users. Also, please note, we're using NextCloud with OnlyOffice (the open source community edition) these days.ĭropbox is the best known of the end-user "cloud storage" services for documents, backups, and synchronising data among multiple devices, although now Google's Drive and Microsoft's OneDrive are functionally similar and are being heavily promoted and tied into all sorts of services. It might still be useful to folks, but use it with caution. Update : this post is now getting a bit long-in-the-tooth, and I need to update it to use up-to-date components.
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