Arguments against cloud services, part one
There was a time when I used to share stuff that I needed from one machine to another by sending myself an email. Even though my devices were in the same home network, sending an email with the files I needed felt simpler. Maybe even faster. Plus there was the added bonus of keeping a trail of that share in the Sent Email folder.
These days it’s different of course. There’s Google Drive, Google Photos, OneDrive and others, each trying every year to raise the bar in how many free services you get. But let’s take each use case and see if the help you get from a subscription service is really matching the price you pay.
Music
The streaming space is huge, varied and full of features. For 10 USD you get Spotify for a month. For 5 USD you get Deezer for a month. Google Play Music used to be a thing too. But you see, the shut down of Google Play Music makes a very powerful point: no matter how good your streaming service is and no matter how powerful the company behind it is, if they get tired of their service they can simply shut it down. Or they can change the price just enough for you to be uncomfortable.
There is another issue though. In the whole year I paid for Deezer premium, every month the song collection would fluctuate. Some artists would simply disappear (sorry, this artist is not available in your country), others would show up for a month or two and so on. Extra bonus: some artists would decide they don’t want the streaming option anymore just to prove a point. Other artists were simply not in that space at all. So yes, streaming is a viable option and works great but it just cannot compare with you owning your music and organizing it the way you want.
One more thing, a bit irrelevant and whiny but I’ll put it here anyway: being able to edit the mp3 tags yourself means you can have a clear picture of your whole music. Especially when browsing by genre. Shoegaze genre? Really? You can collapse many genre wanna-be situations into common names resulting a much cleaner collection. The thing is you are in control of your music collection. You can organize it the way you want, in folders, tags and what not and it can make a lot more sense to you.
Now, of course I cannot argue against having a music subscription service because everybody is doing it and it’s extremely convenient. But once I had my offline library rebuild, I quickly realized another aspect. Usually I just keep listening to the same songs. Of course I want to discover more music and I can do that with several services, usually for free. Even good old radio helps here. But generally when I want to listen to some music, I will listen to the same several songs. They may change on a monthly basis but usually they remain in the same pool. You know what this means? This means you get a better price overall if you buy your collection than if you rent it. If you keep listening to the same songs anyway, why not pay for them once and be done with it? Not to mention that subscription services pay artists extremely poor. If you never heard about it, take a small bit of your time to search around. It will be worth it.
Anyway, these days I have around 2000 songs on my NAS and happily listen to them. I have all you can think of there, from rock to folk, indie, house, rap, metal, pop and others. Classical songs, favorite songs, all time award winning songs, obscure songs I found on Bandcamp and many more. And yes the rule applies: I find myself mostly listening to the same songs each month. Changing from month to month of course and sometimes randomly discovering more songs online, which if I like I buy and store offline.
Photos
Photos deserve a whole article on their own. I used Google Photos and I had so much trouble I don’t even know where to begin. First of all, your 48 megapixel photo carefully composed on your premium phone is for nothing. Once you upload it to Google Photos, it suffers a lot of changes. The resolution to begin with. I don’t know what’s the size these days but I am pretty sure it’s still 2 megapixels. 2 megapixels! I was frantically browsing my downloaded data from Google Photos hoping to find files larger than 3 megabytes in vain. There was nothing there. All photos are capped at a certain resolution and it’s not the original you took. Sure, there were a few options and phone exclusive features at some point but usually you have to pay for those.
Then the organization. Say goodbye to folders because they are just not cool and we should all get over it because it’s 2022 ok? At least that’s what Google thinks. But that’s not really true for everybody. I find folders extremely useful when organizing photos and I want to use them. But with Google Photos? Not a chance. All that Google wants is to make you search for everything, catalog and tag everything so they get to know you better. That does not sit well with organizing photos. Even the albums are auto generated with some barely functioning algorithm that I don’t really need. I know how to organize my photos.
Next up: automatic processing. Because I don’t know how to edit my photos of course and I really want snow drops on my winter photos and all sorts of tints on my autumn photos and so on. Nobody is asking Google to do that with my photos. Of course you can disable all editing and that is fine. But if you disable automatic editing, if you don’t want search and you want to keep your photos uncapped at god knows what quality, why are you using Google Photos in the first place? Not to mention privacy. Why are your photos on foreign servers anyway? They are the most private thing you own. They should be sealed in your basement if possible, not wandering around the web, from server to server, being scanned, tracked, tagged, used to find information about you, your location and your preferred brands.
And finally, Google Takeout. My goodness. You see when I tried to grab all my photos from Google to rebuild my offline collection to store on my NAS, I had the most unpleasant surprises of all. The files were a mess. I already talked about the quality cap, so there was that. But then there were duplicates all over the place in several folders with names that made no sense. They were put in some sort of automatic albums I think, doubled by folders with years and months and doubled again by folders with the albums I created. On top of that, they were duplicated from time to time yet again for no reason but with different dates. And finally, duplicated again for when I shared them in the old Google Hangouts. It was a mess. I worked several months to find duplicates, find the best quality duplicate because yes, each time they were duplicated there was yet another quality loss and so on. I was simply baffled. The mess Google managed to create was unbelievable. And of course there were duplicates generated by Google’s auto editing. Amazing.
Videos
I know I cannot possibly make an argument to have your music collection offline and that’s simply because it would be way too large. I know for movies at least, subscription services are here to stay. But the situation that we have with music repeats itself here also: some movies simply disappear from your paid subscription service. Other movies are not on Netflix but are on HBO and so on. Every month something changes. And it seems to simply relate to the will of several big companies that sign and expire deals as they please. Of course you don’t like it but what can you do?
Well, in fairness you cannot do much. Sure, there is the torrent option but I cannot in good faith recommend it here. Movie rentals? What is this, 1950? Cinema is the best solution I think but again, with current trends cinema might become forgotten wizardry soon. The best bet is to have your favorite movies and shows bought and stored. That way you know if you want to binge watch Breaking Bad again, you can no matter what happens to Netflix, to huge online media businesses or to the entire internet for that matter.
Another aspect here are the home recordings you make with your phone. These are in the same bucket as your personal photos. They should never be on the internet at all. They should never leave your home. Keep them and protect them at all costs. They are none of Google’s business. Yes I know you have nothing to hide, apparently nobody has anything to hide anymore these days but that’s not really the point here, is it? The point is ownership. They are videos of you, about you, made by you. They are of no concern to anybody else. Not to own, not to browse, not even to simply store. This is the definition of privacy.
Sorry for the really long article. There will be a part two where I will argue the same things for documents, code, calendars and others. You don’t need to listen to anything I say here, you don’t have to take any action. Switching from company and stakeholder driven cloud services to something else will always feel like ripping a band aid. You can argue against everything I said here and you will win the argument. This article and the one following it are not for you. You already have compelling and irrefutable arguments in favor of the cloud. This article is not intended to make you quit all online services tomorrow. I wrote this article to make a small dent in your convictions. Just a small dent. And to make others that feel the same way take courage and think even more about online services. It’s not a single battle, really. It’s a lot of things spanning privacy, being at the mercy of big stakeholder decisions, control and many more. If this article made you think for a minute about the disadvantages of cloud services, I have succeeded.
The following article will deal with more cloud services and I will try to make compelling arguments for offline storage there too. I am unreasonable a bit, I know. But again, I am expecting you to be here because in your mind you have reached the same arguments I make. As always, feel free to talk about all of this in the comments. See you in the next article!
