And honestly, there’s the trust factor to it-you have to be willing to put Google and Dropbox in a position of trust, and in the case of Dropbox, at least, I felt like the company had lost my trust. Being a Google or Dropbox user is not the most expensive thing in the world, but you end up giving someone your money that you don’t necessarily have to. I want to be able to efficiently access my stuff on all of these machines. I also have a number of other machines that I use less often, including a decade-old Xeon workstation I use primarily as a home server and that I generally remote into in a headless format, a couple of tablets, and a 2017 HP Spectre x360 that I use primarily as a Linux machine these days (though the Hackintosh flame still burns). On an average day, I move primarily between three different machines for different tasks: my primary machine, a MacBook Air a 2019 MacBook Pro work machine that I try to limit my personal cloud use on (making a web interface desirable) and a 2012 MacBook Pro that has a matte screen that I like for more focused writing. Allow me to work across multiple machines on a daily basis.Part of the reason I started looking for other options was because Google Drive fell down on the job of keeping my writing updated in all places. While my primary editor iA Writer is good at doing this on the Mac, I have found it far from suitable for the job on mobile, in part because of syncing issues that have made life somewhat difficult.

I have years of articles, all written in Markdown, and I would like to be able to edit them on my phone, if a random inspiration strikes me.

Make it easy to access and edit my writing anywhere.

Plus, you have to decide whether you’re going to run your cloud server on a local machine, or on existing cloud infrastructure.

When taking on a project as complicated as running your own version of Dropbox, you need to have an understanding of both what’s out there from a technical standpoint, how your own equipment can help you meet your goals, and what you might give up in the process. ( Pawel Nolbert/Unsplash) The key thing about rolling up your own cloud service is that you need to understand what your ultimate goals are

Dropbox charges