The Cloud¶
The cloud is great. Unlimited storage and easy access for little money. It could not be better.
And then a few years pass, and you realise you don’t know what is where, and, most importantly, you can’t understand how it is possible that you now need a bigger subscription plan for so much data.
In fact, it is very simple. Every cloud service is designed in a way that makes uploading content easy and deleting it difficult. You can’t really blame them, it’s just a business model. A simple way to make sure you will always need more.
But the price is not the biggest issue. More annoying is that organising thousands of files on a local drive is not difficult. Either you are patient, or you write a few scripts and you’re done. Organising thousands of files in the cloud is a different story.
My own personal experience with Google Photos is a textbook example. Google, a company that has given us so many remarkable inventions, created new programming languages, and built technologies that didn’t exist twenty years ago, still cannot provide a delete API for Google Photos, so you could clean it up with a script. Just to make sure you need more storage.
But you don’t always need the cloud. It is not a solution to all problems. Hardware and software are cheaper and easier to maintain than ever before. Setting up a server, keeping it running, and building software that does exactly what you need — and nothing more, can be done quickly.
Let this small website, michalswitala.com, be proof that this is not just an opinion.