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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

The amount of lost time spent sysadminning and configuring and securing these things is not a potential risk, it is a real cost.

Getting NSLed or TOSed is a potential risk, not a guarantee. For most people who are doing nothing controversial or interesting and who are just using the cloud to receive service notifications and correspondence from friends (who are also doing nothing controversial or interesting), it isn’t a loss of control.

This is a real trade-off, and neither is right. But don’t pretend that keeping a half dozen complex services up, backed up, and secured isn’t a huge time investment. You can’t get that back.

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No, not really. It isn't a huge time investment if you know all this well (let's say you sysadmin for work).

Of course it is not feasible for most people to do this, just like it's not feasible for me personally to rebuild my car's engine, or grow vegetables in my garden. Both of which my neighbor does with great ease.

The point is, I use my skills to make my life better, as everyone does. I enjoy it, and it has the side effect of keeping my data private. For things I'm not good at, I either spend time getting good, or I pay a professional for his time and skills.

My mother uses Google and Apple services to back up her photos and data, and I wouldn't dream of forcing my approach on her.

My spouse asked me to set all this up for them, since they share my feelings about data privacy.

OP here - to me, it is not.

For most services I picked SQLite, so the whole backup is one file / directory. Software can easily be updated or test instances started since all is driven by docker. For the few services that need a DB there is a central one serving all hosts. Backups regularly (on a nightly basis where sufficient) go to the NAS. The VM docker is running on gets regular snapshots. Some initial setup and that's it. The whole setup is as movable and reproducible as I could justify making it over a weekend.

Securing theres is an interesting point. I take the risk of a local attacker. Other than that all I got to keep secure is the VPN, which I would have to do anyway.

I am not trying to make it sound like this is something you spend 10 minutes on and call it a day. I am doing this (running prod services) to various degrees for nearly two decades. If you are just getting into all of this, sure, it will take more time and dedication.

I see your point, but I do not necessarily agree with it. I would argue that even with "nothing controversial or interesting" it still is a loss of control. You do not control your data. You do not control if the service will stay available to you and / or your friends.

Ideally, the experience of the time spent leads to innovation and development of personal sysadmin, improving the process. There's a vast difference between technological choices that make sense for corporate IT versus an individual - eg all this "cloud" stuff aimed at simplifying hundreds of machines doing the exact same thing.

Hopefully we're heading towards a future where any non-tech person can easily setup a "personal cloud" by buying a commodity plug-in device, and have secure remote backups at multiple friends' places with a few clicks. Alas, money to actually fund software development was the real win of the surveillance industry.

But to echo your comment - the problem isn't really the time spent administering your own infrastructure, but rather when circumstances prevent you from spending that (focused) time.

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