Arguments against cloud services, part two
In the previous article I started arguing against several cloud services. A very unpopular opinion I think. Even if in recent years people kind of got used to expressing feelings against Google, Facebook, Github or Amazon, actively choosing to quit their services still remains a daunting task. Even thinking about it usually makes you uneasy.
Well I did think about it, I did try several options of quitting these services and that’s what I started writing about in part one. But the online service world is so vast, I was barely scratching the surface. So here we are in part two. We talked media, so this time we will turn to a different set of services. Here we go.
Your NAS will provide an Email Server app. I will talk about my email backup in a different article, how I did it and how I use it, but for now I will just say that you can backup your email from all your email addresses (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo if you still use it, or any other really) to your email server on your NAS. How does that look like? So for example if you use Thunderbird or a certain desktop email client, you configure an email server on your NAS and then you will be able to add the email server on the NAS to your Thunderbird or Outlook email client. And then? Drag and drop. You can simply drag the email you want to save to your NAS from your original email account to your NAS email account. Done.
I will make a separate article where I will expand on all of this but for now, a more important aspect is why would you back up your email to your NAS? Why not leave it in Gmail? In short, I can only give a generic answer: privacy. Sure, Google provides a nice search and other features that you may use but in the end, the email you really want to backup should not be in an online location. As always, Google may stop working (I know, I know), it could put a price on email, it could be unreliable and so on. Plus by removing all this email from Gmail you deny them access to scan, catalog and use your email in thousands of ways, all covered perfectly by their end user license agreement.
I try to stay away from “alarmist privacy” where you slowly become a sort of conspiracy theorist, but even if you disregard all reasons, having all your email in a personal space I think should just make you feel better. And if you want to do that, your NAS has you covered.
Documents
Google Docs has become a staple of online editing. It even has some competition: Microsoft Word online. Both are great and grant you excellent workplace collaboration and seem to be unbeatable at what they do. Who in their right mind would take on a fully fledged office suite? Well, your NAS!
Yes my dear reader, if you have personal documents, expenses sheets, notes and all sorts of household documents, you don’t need a Google account, nor Google Docs. I will mention them again, not to advertise but just to show how serious this space is: Synology, Asus and QNap, all of them offer personal web office suites that work with Office compatible files stored on your NAS. Yes, they have mobile apps so you can edit files while on the road.
What can you do with this information though? Surely I am not asking you to quit using Office? Of course I don’t. I’m just saying that if you have personal documents and you chose to save them on your NAS instead of who knows what online account, you can edit them too using included web and mobile apps. Sure, for your work you will still use Office 365 or whatever comes next. But when thinking about your personal space, about your files and about your default dependency on Google and Microsoft just to create and edit documents, you need to know that’s not needed anymore.
Of course if you want to collaborate on a menu or a guest list, you are not going to do that on a personal NAS mobile app. You will probably do it on an online shareable document. But for your most private documents that you should not keep online, which are not shared outside of your household and to which you need absolute control over who sees what, your NAS has your back.
Calendars
Calendars are usually included in your online email account. Google has them, Microsoft has them, convenient and easy to use. But has it ever occured to you how hard is to migrate your Micorosft calendars to Google or back? You see, this is an inherent problem with all cloud services, it’s part of their annual objective to keep all their users from running away to different providers. I know I used to migrate from Microsoft to Google and back several times because I was getting fed up with the bugs in each, and each time it was a struggle. Either the calendars would not contain all events, or there was no export at all, you had to create a sharing link and try to get the other to read it.
That is just one issue. The other issue is that as always, not all calendars are meant to be shared, scanned, transformed into tasks and so on. Some calendars are just to be kept under lock. You cannot do that online. I always had my schedule tracked by either Microsoft or Google, depending on which service I was using. Sure, you could say it’s useful sometimes, especially if you are using Google Assistant and other assistant type services but maybe one day you will just get fed up by all the bugs, beta features or missing features and will look for something private.
You are probably already expecting this but yes, your preferred NAS has a webcal compliant calendar server included. Why does it matter if it’s webcal compliant? Well that means you can sync all your calendars with your preferred calendar client, either on your desktop, tablet or phone. So you will get that same integration Google Calendar has with your phone, you just need a bit of setting up. And I expand further on how to sync your client with your NAS calendar here.
Contacts
The same story goes for contacts. Usually your contacts are stored in your Google account if you have an Android phone. That always really made me wonder why would Google offer to keep track of my contacts at all. It could be useful, especially when you switch from one phone to another but in the end, they are personal information. Typical privacy stuff.
The standard contact format is called VCF. As far as I know, the official Google contacts app does not allow you to export your contacts to VCF so you can migrate them someplace else. My Samsung phone allows me to export and import contacts to and from VCF files but it’s a Samsung specific feature.
Either way, once you get your contacts from your phone in your NAS, everything will be easy from there. You can edit the contacts from the NAS web application or from the mobile and you can keep the mobile contacts in sync with the NAS via the NAS provided carddav server. Just like calendars. As I wrote in the calendars section, here I explain how to sync your preferred clients with your NAS (it’s the same link).
Notes
The final feature of this article: notes. When I say notes I am referring to the ones you probably have in Google Keep or in Samsung Notes or in Microsoft OneNote. That can also be replaced by the Notes app provided by your NAS.
What does it look like? Simple: you have a web app and a mobile app for taking and organizing quick notes, shopping lists, bookmarks and more. The bonus? The notes are privately and locally stored on your NAS, far away from the scanning and curious hands of any online provider.
So here we are. The end of part two. There will be a part three where I will discuss more cloud services: code and passwords. And maybe a few others. So stick around and as always, for any question please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments. It would just make me consider the things that you want to see in future articles, or provide better explanations resulting in a better article. See you around!
