I don’t know about you, but I’m increasingly finding it difficult to read the news. A late 2025 resolution to only look at the news once per week has slipped a bit this week, particularly with Trump speaking offensive lies at Davos right now, but the intent is holding up fairly well, allowing for feed leakages. In part, it is the powerlessness, the passivity I feel when reading. The sense that there is nothing I can do.
This got me thinking about my dependence on American tech, which is understandably high. With an Android phone, heavy use of Google office, data on Google Drive, Gmail, blog on Blogger, Google Maps, PayPal, my Foundry services are on Sqyre.app, ah the list goes on. Technically very good and reliable services, but here I am trying to allow some feeling through. I’m angry, and dismayed. So, I’ve given myself a small, an inconsequential, amount of power. It’s time to disentangle as much as I feel I can. Some things will go, others will have to stay.
It’s a maze, where I’ll take some wrong turns, and the centre will not be where I think it is. Still, I shall enjoy my wander through the high hedgerows of home NAS and European alternatives. I’ve switched browser to Zen. I run most of my computing on Linux, with some mobile Android. Now it is the turn of my data.
I hold about 360GB of data in Google Drive. The majority of that is made up of gaming hobby digital products accreted over many years. Digital battlemaps take up a substantial amount of storage on their own. This process of organising and culling has made me realise that the data I value most, my photos and videos, and some creative writing project files, are the only ones that I would value having on Cloud as an additional backup. This is less about ease of access when away from home, but more having a supplementary copy stored and managed by someone else to provide me with an extra secure copy. That someone else now has to be ‘not American’.
A home NAS to store my data is almost inevitable, but I want to start steadily. I’ve bought a couple of 1TB USB HDDs to store the data, one a copy of the other. I will need to work out an rsync script to keep them aligned. One should be stored away from the home and I will see how frequently they really need to be kept in parity. The download of 360GB over my Plusnet Fibre to the cabinet connection is a painful travesty. Despite guaranteed 50 mb/s speeds, I’m only managing 2-4 mb/s however I connect to my router. Although customer services were available, pleasant and tried to be helpful, it seems clear that when we are talking large blobs of data, the service just grinds to a halt. I’m dragging folders over gradually right now, but have the option of visiting a friend who has a super highway available.
This process will allow me to delete a sizable chunk of the data on Google Drive. I will drop to a very basic tier to support Google photo, Gmail, and their office docs. I’m looking at Proton as an alternative (just reading Trump sticking it to the Swiss in his Davos address), providing me with some cloud storage and an alternative to Gmail. I already have an email domain with Hostinger, so an email transfer is much easier, with much of the effort being in extricating my accounts on various websites. Part of the cull will be to remove most of my email subscriptions. I have already blitzed through Gmail removing unneeded big attachments. My heart says to go Norwegian with JottaCloud, storing my data securely up a Scandinavian mountain. The Linux client side may deter me, but I still like the idea of it.
Transferring all my Google Photos to an offline copy is also on the hopper.
This will take some time. I’m alive to the notion that this is an illusory galvinisation of action, a call to arms, that will remain unseen and benefit no-one, least of all myself. And yet, I’d rather stand up and do something. While I’m at it, can we remove Palantir from our NHS please? Cheers!