Because I am ostensibly in the “tech community”, I am informed that I should be thinking about cloud computing.

And so here I am. Let the thinking commence.

First, a bit of background. I’m sitting in a coffee shop (which for my friends will be no surprise at all) and typing on an old Bluetooth keyboard paired to my smartphone.

The keyboard is larger than the display. Last time I had it that way round, I was using a Nokia internet tablet bunnyhopping my 3G. But now, we carry smartphones and with that, we carry the whole world around all of the time.

People don’t want to sync. People want *stuff* to sync for them. Palm people, you’re with me on this one. Yes, it was easy to drop your device in to the cradle and press the HotSync button, but it would have been all the cooler if it had just happened by itself without having to remember.

Humans are notoriously bad for remembering to do basic tasks with any degree of reliability. One need only look at the airline industry. A non-zero sum of crashes are caused by pilot error. Which is not to say that these are bad pilots. Quite the reverse; in some cases, excellent airmanship saves the plane. But the problem is what pilots call “the scan”: checking altitude, attitude, airspeed, etc. This is a routine part of flying. The auto-pilot takes care of the actual hands-on flying (apart from take-off and landing) and the captain and first officer take more of a supervisory role making sure the aircraft is doing what it’s supposed to be doing.

Which is so boring. And which is why humans lose interest and planes crash.

What the hell does any of this have to do with my computer?

Good question, those of you who asked. Let’s steer the ship back into Ritalin Bay. The point, dear reader, is that I suck at remembering to do stuff. Important stuff, like back up my devices. Which is why I need it automated. Which is why my main machine at home backs up by script and notifies me, dead-man-switch-style, when it can’t. Then I can take action.

But syncing? Tricky. There are services that’ll do it. But all of them require you to trust a system implicitly. As though it can do no wrong. Now, for the most part, that may be true. Your syncing system doesn’t plan on aborting take-off without your say-so or ploughing into a mountain. But it might end up doing it without meaning to.

Enter, the faithful landline phone. At this point, we’re more keen than ever to drag the beaten, bruised, possibly aflame black box from the wreckage and work out where your data went. To do so is costly, both from a time and computation standpoint. You call the provider. Pass a bunch of security questions and then maybe, maybe, they can restore a remote backup to you. Maybe. Assuming they’re keeping good backups and that they have one of the offending data. Which might be a long shot.

However, if I were to run my own cloud, at home on my own equipment, I can simply switch to the other drive if my data takes a nosedive. Like nothing ever happened. The fabled Undo Last 24 Hours. So when my contact list takes a dirt nap at 4:30pm, I can just switch over to my previous dupe, made that morning at 5am. As long as I get back to my server somehow before first light tomorrow, I can forget about what happened today and go from yesterday’s set.

Fiddly. This is the first word that sprung to mind when I first contemplated this idea. Fiddly to set up but simple when working (as long as you don’t fiddle with settings) although fiddly again when something goes wrong and you have to nuke it and start again.

Maybe I’m being pessimistic. Maybe. Or maybe I’m being crushingly realistic. It could all go wrong. I could lose *all* my data, not just the last 24 hours, especially if my maths are wrong or my method just doesn’t work. Perhaps I should trust the giant farms, with my data securely red-velvet-roped off away from the insurance database to one side and the illicit porno collection to the other. (My data’s in a nice neighbourhood in that rack.) They’ve been doing it for a while so why should it go wrong? Probably just paranoid.

But is that such a bad thing? Is it wrong of me to be fiercely protective of my data, given how some datacentres and services have been hacked recently, leaving an oil-slick of data on the Internetic Ocean? Someone once said, “never underestimate the bandwidth of a station-wagon laden with floppies doing 70 on the highway.”

I can’t remember who said that.

Maybe it was Stallman.

I forget.

Point is, they were on to something. If *I* have my data, I can access it with no latency, no throttling, no nothing. I can just unplug a FireWire cable and pour it into my machine. I can put my cloud in a bag, a suitcase or a hotel safe. And I can take if offline if I need to. Also, because it’s all local, if my connection goes down, it doesn’t matter. Syncing will still happen over Wi-Fi and Ethernet at home. But it will still happen.

In typical fashion, I have probably overthought the problem and overcomplicated this post. But I am keen to hear from people. Would you use something like this if it were easy, safe and mostly free?

Please let me know via the usual, or @thecontingency.