The Cloudpocalypse Will Not Be Televised... or on Youtube.

April 5, 2019

I was a HUGE Google Plus user. It was my blog, my Instant Messenger, my telephone. I used Plus and Hangouts for everything I did online. And if you weren't on it I didn't exist to you because I gave up everything else. Enter April 2019 and G+ is dead and buried. Nothing more than a blurry mashup of memories and dead URLs. So as to not have all my major memories from 2011 to 2018 completely vanish into the ether of Internet I decided to go to Google Takeout and download my archives. 40 GB later I was just stunned.

I knew I used Plus a lot. But 40 GBs? That seemed a lot. A whole lot. I mean sure I can find thumb drives bigger than that. But that is just Plus. Looking around the net at all my social accounts, pictures, storage and etc. I probably have somewhere between 750 and 800 GB of data floating around in various clouds. That is a lot of data. Data that I am use to not being responsible for until some service shutdown. Even more, if you look at TV shows, movies, music and books then I have multiple TBs of media and posts out there. If I had to backup all that data:

I would have no where near enough space at home to store all that data.
I would have no backup plan to make sure I could keep 3:2:1 backup of all that data (3 backups, 2 different types of media, 1 off site copy).
The act of simply downloading all that data to my own systems would blow though my current datacap multiple times over.

So here I stand. Totally dependent on external cloud storage because I have neither the resources nor a plan to handle all the data that I own, lease, have associated with my various accounts online. It sometimes feels like I met some cool dude at a party that offered me a cigarette and then BANG I'm hooked on PCP. It is becoming clear that I need cloud rehab.

So what do I mean when I say cloud rehab. First of all I need storage. A crap ton of spinning, solid state, pretty high speed storage. And I need all of that data to be redundant. RAID 3 or 5 or something at least. So when a disk failure does happen I am prepared. Second I need to stop depending only on streaming services. Sure most TV shows can live on my six to nine months cloud DVR through my favorite cord cutting service. But for my movies and favorite TV shows I want to watch ad nauseam I need to start caving those on my own network. The data cap savings alone would be worth it.

Putting it short this is a scary undertaking. I've personally gotten so use to a steady diet of streaming services where at the mercy of good account settings and ISP network saturation and latency to view what I want or virtually own. Its strange you have to almost be a network architect just to run your home network.