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Comment by MrDresden | Hacker News Reader

I keep telling anyone who will listen that they need to move every aspect of their online identity away from the big tech giants, and make sure that each type of service (email, webpage, memory storage, document storage, backups, contacts, etc) is compartmentalized in such a way that if one gets removed then it wont affect the others in any way.

Imagine having all your memories in the form of images and videos taken away because of sloppy review work at a tech company.

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I want to, really I do, but it feels like trading one devil for another.

Email is by far the biggest albatross around my neck. To migrate email requires me to setup two different failure points: purchase a domain and a Fastmail-like service. Now that is two different places that are subject to me forgetting to pay a bill, being social engineered into giving away my account, etc. To say nothing of the long tail of acquaintances who only know be my current address.

Yet still, this existential terror exists that I will Do Something Wrong (no you will never know what it was), and lose everything.

E-mail should be the first thing you migrate, precisely because it is the key to every other service you rely on. If you're randomly banned from your E-mail service, you're pretty much screwed. E-mail is too important to let someone else host. Move it as close to your own control as your technical ability allows. Do it today, in fact, do it right now.

+1! Getting your own domain name is not hard, you can still use GMail with it for now, and switch to something else if there's a problem with it. Plus xyz@yourowndomain.com is way cooler than xyz@gmail.com.

Autopay is simple to set up with any hosting provider. If you're in a financial place where the $5/mo and $10/yr payments might bounce... yeah, probably don't pay for email.

As far as the social engineering goes, personally I gladly take that risk in order to bring my email firmly into my control. If I'm going to lose access to my email, I want it to be because I did something stupid, not because an algorithm flagged my account and Google has no humans I can appeal to.

The long tail of acquaintances isn't bad either: just forward emails from Gmail to your new address. If you lose access to the Gmail account at some point, you'd have lost everything anyway, so this arrangement would be strictly better.

I'm not fully confident that I'll never cancel a credit card that pays annual subscription. Generally it's fine because alert email would come on my inbox, but it's email infrastructure so I need extra attention.

You can prepurchase a domain for 10 years. Set a calendar reminder 9 years from now to renew for another 10..

Most providers don’t offer that, though. I can recommend Hover.com for multi-year leases without crazy rate upcharges.

I’m not big on PayPal but I have some domain names set up for recurring PayPal payments (with cc as a backup) because PayPal is insidious with regards to how far they go to fund your account (charging multiple cards, goopy your bank account, sending you letters for debt collection, etc) which, for most things, would be exactly the opposite of what I want but for domain names it’s a huge burden lifted.

My pictures and videos are synced to iCloud, Google Photos, and MS OneDrive. My photos are synced to Amazon Drive too.

Do you use the same email or 2FA for all of those? If so, you still have a potential single point of failure if that provider decides to ban your account.

It is unlikely that both the email and 2FA will fail you at the same time, unless perhaps you are using gmail and Google authenticator (though I am not sure how much authenticator is tied to your Google identity as I don't use it).

Use email, phone and app 2FA plus printable 2FA codes, and you'll always have a way.

Frankly if all of these can be made inaccessible in one go then the setup was mighty flawed to begin with.

Google authenticator was entirely offline the last time I checked, so even it should be fine.

No.

- iCloud 2FA is another Apple device.

- I don’t care enough about my Google account to have 2FA. Besides the occasional SMS.

- Microsoft 2FA is Microsoft Authenticator.

Microsoft 2FA is any TOTP Client. I use it with KeePass (Strongbox Client on Mac and iPhone)

That sounds sorta expensive but I get it. I’m at 3tb of photos and videos. It’s becoming unmanageable… anyone aware of an self hosted multi redundancy photo storage that doesn’t involve manual copying of large amounts of files? Or other non time consuming setups that works with iPhones (me and my SO)?

OneDrive - part of the $99 Office365 subscription. You get 1TB each up to 6 users

Apple iCloud - 2TB as part of a bundle.

Google Drive - I haven’t had to start paying for it yet.

Amazon Drive - part of Amazon Prime

I use Backblaze B2 and ‘PhotoSync’. PhotoSync is great in any case, as it can push and pull from basically anywhere. The only issue is it’s phone based.

I just do real time photos to iCloud or google, and full backup of everything to backblaze.

This event happens so rarely that it would be better advice to tell people to wear a bullet proof vest and helmet when going outside. It’s more likely to benefit them than self hosting media.

> This event happens so rarely

Does it though?

Also: I wear a helmet or a belt every single time I drive even for 1km. Should I not? I never needed them. 0% use rate so far for me, might as well not have done it.

The issue is that when it happens, you're done.

Considering that you probably don't need to keep all your eggs in one basket, why not at least try?

On this note, I wish providers were forced to provide a third-party backup mechanism for important data so that if I were to lose:

- the email: it could forward my email to at least receive them

- my photos: a copy could be kept on multiple hostings

etc

You don't need to self-host, there are plenty of alternatives for each service offered by google.

The problem is finding them. If a layman looks for a cloud back up provider that isn't one of the BigTech group - uses Duck Duck Go and finds a small company offering 10GB back up for free. Unfortunately for them, that service is using AWS for storage, so ultimately despite they're best effort they're just using amazon cloud storage.

This is where the small guys kick ass vs the Googles/Microsoft. Try Dropbox, Backblaze etc. Much better experience. Apple is OK UX wise but locked in which sucks.

Dropbox used to be hosted on AWS.

How is a laymen supposed to tell the difference between Backblaze - running their own servers, and a Dropbox-like - which is really just uploading your files to amazon's servers?

That's the point I was trying to make.

Assuming Dropbox encrypt the data at rest, Amazon won't have any access to it. And if they do delete stuff they now have to deal with a company instead of single individuals.

I wouldn't call Dropbox small guys, lol. They can build one large nuclear powerplant on their revenue every 2 years.

That is right, but I cant resist bringing out the trope that airpods product line alone - just one produce line! - is one of the world’s biggest businesses and dwarfs most unicorns like Dropbox.

People have a problem finding DropBox, OneDrive, Box, Apple iCloud?

Dropbox used Amazon until 2016, to only have their own datacentres in the last 5 years. Who's to say they decide that's not economical and move back to aws?

OneDrive IS Microsoft and iCloud IS Apple so they ARE BigTech, the same as Google? I don't see how that argues against the point?

Box is the only one in that seems to qualify? Kinda proves my point that it's not at all easy for a laymen.

So instead of depending on three of the largest tech companies with built in redundancies, you want to depend on a fly by night operator with no track record?

You would even avoid DropBox because they also chose to use proven reliable technology until their own technology was good enough?

I mean personally I use iCloud and Google Drive, but i fully understand that at any point Apple or Google could decide to hand all of my data to a government, accidently turn off all their security and let anybody access my data, delete my data, or even go bankrupt.

But the point I was making was that it was hard for a laymen to decide to avoid using any of the bigtech companies, since so many of the small upstarts are just build on-top of the existing bigtech and aren't forthcoming on if they own the datacentre or if its Azure/Aws etc, so for those who they really did have privacy as their key driver it probably would be easier to self-host, or you have to trust somebody.

The adage that there's no such thing as cloud computing, just somebody else's computer makes sense. If you're that concerned with privacy it's far easier to run your own.

There is very much such a thing as “cloud computing”. The “cloud” isn’t just a bunch of VMs. There is an entire offering on top of the VMs. Your average consumer is not going to spin up a bunch of Linode VMs and create their own backup solutions.

slip of the tongue/keyboard. It was obviously supposed to read "There's no such thing as cloud storage, just somebody else's computer." It's a fairly well known phrase[0][1]. It's even a laptop sticker[2].

And no, they're not going to spin up a VM. They should buy their own NAS and back everything up to that if they care enough about privacy to avoid cloud storage.

[0] https://pocketnow.com/no-such-thing-as-the-cloud [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/argram/the_clo... [2] https://www.redbubble.com/shop/there+is+no+cloud+stickers

Just because it is well known doesn’t make it true. S3 alone is made up of 100+ microservices

Sure, but we're talking about cloud storage here for a laymen, who's hardly likely to know what AWS is, and we're also talking about a laymen who just wants to backing up a file, they're not using thinking about any of that. They just want to put their file on a drive somewhere. I'm arguing that if they care that much about privacy they should back it up to a device they own, and not use on a cloud provider. You're not providing a defence against any of that. You're saying that instead of storing their files on Google's computer they should use Amazons, or Microsofts? Why? If they truly value their own privacy they should back things up to a device they own such as a NAS, and/or a trusted family members NAS.

I've also just seen, which you didn't disclose, that you work at AWS[0]. Not disclosing a vested interest doesn't exactly lend confidence to your impartiality. Either way, I'm still not sure how your argument is a rebuttal to my proposal. SO far it seems to amount to "other cloud providers exist" and "Your mistype wasn't accurate"?

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32556018

How do you know how often it happens?

Anecdote: It's happened twice for me. Once was for an app I published they decided was against ToS, two years after I published it. And the other was an accidental account deletion when upgrading Google Apps (luckily this one was mostly recoverable... if you know the right people at Google).

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