The cloud won, again
Since 2018 (and again in 2020), I’ve been writing about how defaulting to cloud-based solutions instead of self-hosting everything has changed my life for the better. Even knowing that for years, I still made the wrong decision to self-host a service I needed and almost doubled down on doing it again. This was until I stopped and figured out an easier way to achieve the same goal.
I’ve been a Dropbox user for nearly 15 years. It really simplified my approach to backups for personal stuff: a cloud-synced folder on my laptop where I put everything that’s not already on a cloud service. Accidentally deleted something? I can just go to their web app and restore it. The problem is that I don’t want it offering a read-write version of this folder on every device I have. Sometimes I just need a temporary folder to drop a screenshot from my Windows gaming machine so I can access it from my phone.
Resilio Sync (previously known as BitTorrent Sync) is what I was using for that. It has a few problems, including being super slow even after configuring everything possible to bypass its relay servers (spoiler: it doesn’t). Plus, it doesn’t have cloud-backed storage, so I ran an instance of it on a server to have an always-on copy of the files there. Not exactly a drop-in replacement for Dropbox, but it was still useful until I realized I was completely unhappy with its performance.
Things were reaching a point where I was considering self-hosting Nextcloud (fork of the original ownCloud) just for its file-syncing feature or even writing my own cloud-folder synchronization tool backed by S3-compatible storage. That’s when it clicked: I realized I don’t need real-time syncing for the simple use case of easily sharing single files from a computer to my phone. I just needed a way to access a Cloudflare R2 bucket from a mobile app.
After looking around, asking ChatGPT and Perplexity, I settled on S3 Files. I can upload a file from Windows using WinSCP or from a macOS/Linux terminal using s3cmd. Each machine uses a fine-grained access key I can revoke if needed. The S3 API is ubiquitous. I just needed a mobile app to access it when I’m away from my computer. It offered me the ease, speed, availability, and robustness of the cloud, which are miles ahead compared to self-hosting anything.