Personal cloud

I think service providers by default should store the data you upload to your own personal cloud. This is a thing that’s now possible, and wasn’t 15 years ago.

Arguments

I think everyone should own a “drive” on the web that applications integrate with. This is where you store your photos, your save games, your notes, your bookmarks, your search history, your instant messages, your calendar, contacts, emails, passwords, your data. Potentially even your tweets/comments/posts.

If some company wants to provide you with a service, you give them access to their little corner of your data so you can sync through them, have AI recognize people, store your professional photos in original resolution and optimized etc.

There are more benefits. If everyone is responsible for their own data, someone stealing data from some company would not get any personal data - there’s no LastPass to get every password in the world from.

And there’s the potential for this to store the books, music, games and movies you’ve bought too, so the money can go back to the artist again. You could stream it directly from your personal cloud. And never have to worry about some provider going bankrupt, because your data is just yours. But not initially.

Companies might also be able to use some version of this, but I’d like to start with the private version first. For companies, things like contracts, customer relations, accounting, etc would be relevant.

Problems

There are problems too though. Need to write about them too. Encryption is hard. How will services get access to the data? Can I design an interface that covers all the things I wrote above? How about search across data? But the great thing is that these problems could be solved by companies who want to make money off of this. Communication is hard. How do I communicate to non-techs the importance of this? How do I make it easy to set up? How do I show the authorization? What apps have what kinds of access to what data? Should people also have a database for themselves, where apps can put data they need to join etc? What about performance, will it need to know stuff like what data center the person has stored their data in in order to be performant? Can the services cache data so they can provide a better experience?

Notes

Things I’d like to store there:

photos, save games, notes, bookmarks, search history, instant messages, calendar, contacts, emails, passwords, playlists, likes (albums, books, artists, songs) your notes about them, code repositories?, settings for applications, certificates and ssh keys, voice memos, documents, CVs, play counts for songs, achievements for games?, reviews of companies, webpages I’d like to keep,

I also want to create this (if it doesn’t already exist?) open source and freely usable, so someone can start a company that makes money off of this, but developers can just run their own if they want.

This also maybe ties in to the “online identity” I’ve been thinking of. Will need to write about that too.

Investigation

I’ve looked a little at what this would currently cost, and it’s at about 60 USD/TB/month for google drive today incl. taxes. In aws/google cloud/ovh you could get as low as 1 USD/TB/month if you never need to look at your data, but around 10-20 USD/TB/month + taxes is probably more realistic. But here, you pay GB by GB instead of everything at once, and you could potentially yourself choose how to optimally store your digital life. Aws also has the elastic file system, where they claim they can keep the “total cost of ownership” as low as $31/TB/month + taxes.

A company/product like CloudBerry Labs/MSP360 is already doing some of this, with “bring your own storage” backup software that’s pretty neat. It would be relevant to get them to integrate with this.

Looking further, it’s actually fairly common for backup services to provide “bring your own storage”. Which makes sense, you want to have easy backup of your stuff to a place that you own. But most of these are backup for business, it’s much less common to provide the service for people.

“MySpace”…

Backblaze has 6 USD/TB/month, Hetzner has about 7 EUR. Those are both with 3 TB egress, which is where the other storage providers try to keep you. Backblaze provides unlimited egress at 15 USD/TB/month, Hetzner doesn’t even provide that. And they’re both S3 compliant. There’s probably a library somewhere that wraps file systems in an S3 interface.