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Comment by 8fingerlouie | Hacker News Reader

I know this is not what people want to hear, but your data will never be safer than it is in the cloud. No setup you can dream up at home with in a reasonable budget will ever come close to the resilience and redundancy you have in the cloud.

Ownership is not about storing everything at home (or well, it's part of it), but having control over your data, which you can easily have while at the same time using the convenience that the cloud offers.

In the cloud your major concern is not losing data, but losing access to data, and you can counter that with making backups.

If privacy is a concern, use something like Cryptomator[1] to source encrypt data before uploading it. Cryptomator in particular integrates well with mobile phone operating systems, and has clients for all major operating systems (yes, Linux included).

Source encrypt your backups as well, and nobody can read your data besides you.

[1]: https://cryptomator.org

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> Ownership is not about storing everything at home (or well, it's part of it), but having control over your data, which you can easily have while at the same time using the convenience that the cloud offers.

Ownership is not just about r/w control of your data but also over what software gets access to it and what that software does. Not just about privacy, but knowing the process and being able to alter it to your desires. There is no way to control that unless you run your own servers.

Does it matter if data is encrypted ?

If it does, I assume you also roll your own network equipment. If you're worried about surveillance, know that you're far more likely to be targeted at the network port than at your data.

As for the process, the cloud (for storing data) is nothing more than a remote fileshare that someone else keeps running. If you have an up to date copy of your data you can change the process any way you like.

Servers are not free, nor are they fire and forget. Once you setup a server and decide to open it to the internet, you become a target, and you will be found. There are bots scouring the entire ip range of every residential IP network looking for juicy targets, and when they find something they record it for later use. Then when some new 0-day is found for service X that you're running, they don't need to scan, they can just lookup in their database an exploit right away.

I'm not against self hosting, and god knows I've been doing it for decades, but it is very rarely worth the hassle compared to the gains. The power cost alone of running a server is more than the equivalent cost of storing it in the cloud (assuming we're not talking media servers, but regular user created data).

The worst argument I usually see is people self hosting mail for private, completely oblivious to the fact that there are usually 2+ people in a mail thread, and something 68% of the worlds population runs on Google/Microsoft/Apple/whatever, so while you may keep your emails private, if they're targeted for being scanned they have already been so.

As long as they don't need to decrypt your data, then that is fine as they are working strictly as a dumb storage at that point. Eg. I have keep encrypted backups in the cloud.

For other things it's about being in control, if just for tinkering. I self host mostly to not being reliant on 3rd parties for everything and to just know how it works. I don't do it for privacy. IMO if you want something private, you don't put it on the internet.

I can't help but feel on-device storage is still safer than cloud storage. Sure, can use cryptomator or similar to encrypt on cloud, but that's same with local. Only with cloud you're opening up a much bigger attack vector space than having it on-device/"at home". Cloud definitely gives better resiliency and redundancy, but data replication is also something to be cautious with if privacy is a concern.

Assuming your data stays at home, without opening any firewall ports, then maybe your data is safer. You're still only one malware/burglary/house fire/flooding/accident away from losing it.

The moment you start opening ports you're no longer remotely safe. Cloud providers have dedicated staff monitoring services (or monitoring systems monitoring services) for anomalies, as well as people monitoring their networks. These same people will also know in advance when a new patch is coming for some 0-day exploit that might leave them vulnerable.

Compared to your setup at home, where you will patch it "eventually" (at the earliest when you get home from work), and you won't know if you're the target of an attack until your server gives up.

Not to mention the risk of losing other data. The LastPass leak a couple of years ago was made possible by attackers gaining access to an unpatched Plex server on a developers home network, from which they could gain access to his work laptop. LastPass had questionable security practices sure, but the validity of the attack still stands.

> your data will never be safer than it is in the cloud

Unless you use Google Timelines. Then you’re out of luck.

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/03/24/google-maps-timeline-data...

Yeah, it's really about picking your hosting partner.

I'm happy with Apple and iCloud holding our personal contacts and calendars. I'm happy with Fastmail holding our email. I still have local (and other online) backups, of course.

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