I was interested in trying out a service like OneDrive or Dropbox, but one thing always held me back: the idea that at any moment, and for any reason, the company could lock me out of my files.

The problem

No one wants to have their data held hostage by a third-party. How can you get the benefits of using cloud storage while also retaining ownership rights and having a level of assurance that your files will always be accessible?

The solution

Luckily, there’s a simple solution: Perform full backups of your cloud files in an environment that you control.

"Backup your data, you say?! What a novel idea!" /S

The setup

I use rclone to sync files from my cloud storage accounts to a VM running Alpine Linux. rclone works with over 40 cloud storage providers, has a very easy-to-use CLI, and works with modern authentication systems.

A cron job runs daily, pulling down any file changes into the backup.

I have the replication job set to exhaustively copy all files in the account to the local machine.