Is I.T. life without " The Cloud " possible ?

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I am trying to hang on to some sort 'privacy' by keeping my personal information on my own devices rather than sending it all out into the multiverse on that lovely fluffy white thing hanging in the sky ( a mega server ! )
I am constantly being plaguaged with instructions to enroll with the cloud, and problems with my live.com account.
Can any of you tech' savvy people out there tell me if 'Cloud' enrollment is essential and inevitable ?

It does offer the advantage of being able to access your stuff from anywhere you are, as long as you've got an internet connection and the service providers don't let you down.

Me, I've only bothered using the cloud to familiarise myself with how to use it, never for anything serious or private in any way. I get a long way by carrying flash drives with me on my travels. A lot of programs can be got in portable form so more or less any Windows device can be used to run them. Flash drives are private as long as you don't lose them, and you can always encrypt things in case you do. Not that a lost flash drive is all that likely to fall into evil hands. Some individual might take a look, but they'd probably decide the files aren't worth anything, and reformat the whole thing. Even so, it's likely wise to refrain from putting files on there that could be used against you, like banking login details. Or if you must put such files on the drive, obfuscate and encrypt them to reduce the risks. All in all, probably safer than uploading the data into cyberspace. And obviously, it's wise to keep a backup of all your data elsewhere, whether the "original" is on a flash drive or in cyberspace. Drives can die.

Some programs these days are cloud-only, often as a way of getting users to pay a monthly subscription, so I just don't bother with those. It's very rare I pay for a program anyway. I just keep using freeware, mostly quite old freeware.

It is possible, I have my own personal cloud that is in my cupboard. That's where all my files live and I can access them securely from anywhere, and my calendar is on there. It also hosts a minecraft server and streams video and music to all my devices.

You can even host your own email server but I don't do that. It's easier to use something like Protonmail if you want privacy.

But to host your own cloud you'll need to learn about servers, relevant operating systems, cloud hosting software and security certificates and port forwarding and all kinds of exciting stuff.

I think, unless you were particularly interested in that stuff, you probably wouldn't bother.

Unfortunately, the tech industry has decided that the cloud is the way forward and they're going to push everyone to use it as much as possible.

Currently it's mainly files but increasingly processing will be done on remote servers, applications will be 'served', not running on your own computer. The goal, if you talk to big tech, is 'Everything as a Service' (EaaS).

You can resist for a while but eventually you'll be forced to comply!

everything is possible given enough time and money.

google:
"airgap" "linux" "hardening"

One such article:
https://security.stackexchange.com/ques ... mputer-use

If you are not really good with computers, or don't want the trouble . . . turn it off and read a good book.

I call it the Renter Economy. I'm hoping I've stockpiled enough vintage hardware to keep me safe from it for the rest of my life.

In the beginning, there was life.  Before "The Cloud", before A.I., before the Internet, and even before personal computers, there was life.

Not having room for a CAD station in my flat, I've considered using the cloud, but just how secure is it? The thoroughness with which I've been hacked lately, suggests the perps would find a way to screw with such work, too.

For privacy, it may help to create and use aliases.

For example, my real name isn't "Kokopelli" and I try not to write anything here that could be used to identify me. In spite of that, if someone were to compare my writing here with my writing elsewhere, they could surely tell that I'm possibly the same person.

I'm going more and more to using a different alias on each site. For example, my Facebook page uses an alias. I only opened the page so that I could check out the pages for a few local restaurants with Facebook pages.

My primary e-mail is through ProtonMail but I have a Visionary Account and can have up to 100 different e-mail addresses on it.

In the recent past, I even made two posts on the same web page with completely different aliases. One of the aliases is so nonsensical that it is hard to imagine anyone actually having that name since the first name was northern European and the last name was Vietnamese.

Also, note that it wouldn't be that hard to be "Thor Singh" on one site but with an e-mail such as [email protected].

My goal is to have a different alias for each of my appearances on the Internet.

Mix it up a bit and have fun and if you ever meet anyone really named Kokopelli, you haven't seen me.

Irony of using social media (that is: Wrong Planet) to talk about going off grid.
Just saying.

The site is social media, but I do think that it's often worth recognizing that there is a fundamental difference between sites like this where you mostly just see the posts that exist at any given time with full choice about what to look at versus sites like FB, YT and the like where there's an algorithm that decides what to push your way and it can be incredibly hard to find other things unless you specifically know to search for it.

In terms of the cloud, I've been increasingly moving my stuff over to my own NAS that then gets backed up to a computer that gets backed up to the cloud in an encrypted form. For a home user, that's realistically about the best I'm going to be able to do as I don't have the resources to have another computer set up to receive the backups in a different region.

On the other hand, if you use an alias that you don't use anywhere else and if identifying information about yourself is not posted, then it would generally be very difficult for anyone without the server logs to tie it back to you. Use a good VPN that doesn't keep logs and i would be much harder to tie back to you.

"For privacy, it may help to create and use aliases." A minimum neccessity, but even then one can be traced through one's ISP, unless one uses Tails (which may do the job, but I've not been able to download it, even using the system at a convolecing home, or at this public library). Then there's the problem of handling payments (the ultimate purpose of my project) and paying taxes.

It looks like I'd have to go the whole hog, of changing my identity in every respect, and moving to another region (or planet...). Given how resourceful the hackers have been, I may have to just get a bigger place, work at home, and revert to using the postal service!

Do you use a credit card? They know. Drive down the street? They saw. Send email? It never goes away.

Just assume that they know. Get used to it. Don't do anything you wouldn't do in front of your mother.

I suppose one concern about using removable storage media such as flash drives to access data from any computer (instead of uploading the data to a storage service) is that it can spread viruses more easily. No reason why you can't upload infected files of course, but it's difficult or impossible to get a virus into many filetypes. It's not particularly difficult to infect a flash drive though.