A few years ago, the thought of putting even the slightest amount of data in a place not physically accessible by me made me utterly uncomfortable. I always wanted to be the master over my data in every way and to the utmost extent.

Of course the indiviuum has better control over its data when it is stored “offline”, physically not accessible from others. May it be criminals, officials or just the software indexing your data storage for search. This is the best solution for you and your data? As long as everything in the world is normal.

The problem comes in times of disasters. What if your house and computer gets destroyed in a natural disaster? What if you have to leave your computer behind for whatever reason? All your data will be inaccessible in an instant. Maybe you can never ever get a hold of it again.

An experience like this made me rethink my stance on this matter. Of course, being alive is the foremost important thing in times of war or disaster. But when you finally can settle down somewhere there might be things that you can never get back.

For example, almost everyone of us is taking pictures of memorable moments in our lives. All your pictures gone forever? Music can be repurchased, official documents can be reissued. But those unique moments captured by camera can never be brought back. Sad.

Another example is when running a business. Keeping an offsite-backup of your important data can help you to continue your business even in times when something is happening to your office (Fire etc.).

Leaving some data in a cloud storage might still leave some bitter aftertaste, since it is potentially readable by others. But this taste can be thinned out by applying a solution which encrypts the data before storing it on the services’ servers.

I myself decided to embrace the cloud more and keep backups of images, important data and more on several independent cloud services. The nice side-effect of this: I have potential access to almost all of my data from everywhere in the world while I am travelling, not having to worry about what to bring and what not before I am leaving my house.