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We share our lives on Facebook and Twitter, send email through Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo, and share our thoughts and stories on hosted blog platforms. We've effectively become digital sharecroppers, working someone else's soil as it were.
On the surface it seems like a good idea -- let someone else worry about keeping everything running, making redundant backups, paying the bandwidth bills and all the other complexities while you or your company focus on what you do. Then one day you wake up and your email is gone; your blog's URL has been redirected and your RSS feeds no longer update. Suddenly sharecropping looks like what it is -- giving away your data and your company's data so others can profit off it.
It isn't a question of whether or not today's biggest companies and services will fail, it's a question of when. Remember Geocities? Friendfeed? Google Reader? Gowalla? Pownce? Dropbox? Oh right, Dropbox is still here. For now. And Google would never shut down Reader, oops, I mean Drive. Microsoft will never close SkyDrive.
Our casual reliance on and willingness to give our data over to pretty much any not new company that comes along should be alarming if you care at all about owning and preserving your digital legacy.
What's more surprising than individuals relying on third-party services though is that some of the biggest companies in the world have placed critical elements of their infrastructure -- email, cloud storage, code hosting and file syncing -- in the hands of other companies which may or may not last, let alone have other business's best interests in mind.
What makes the prevalence of digital sharecropping even more surprising is that, in most cases, it's unnecessary for both individuals and companies. As we saw in the first article in this series, for pretty much every commonly used service out there there's a self-hosted version available -- typically as free or open source software you can install on servers you or your business controls.
Critics of this DIY web would here point out that the reason most people do not in fact do things themselves is that it's simply too much work. But as the popularity of Wordpress demonstrates, it's possible to build self-hosted software that just about anyone can use.
Of course, in the case of social networks, there's more to the picture than just software. I'm not going to suggest that you can replace Facebook with some free code you grabbed off GitHub. What you can do though is stop sharecropping where you can, right now. Future-proof your data by taking control of what you can today; worry about the rest when you've exhausted what's possible right now.
In the previous article we looked at one small example of how cloud services can fail you and your business -- the demise of Google Reader. Replacing Google Reader with a self-hosted alternative like TinyTinyRSS isn't too difficult; the OPML format offers reasonably good data portability which allows you to simply reload your RSS feeds in a new reader.
Taking charge of your file hosting, cloud storage/sync or code hosting is obviously a little more complex. But the risk of not controlling these key pieces of infrastructure is also correspondingly higher, especially for businesses where these are key elements of day-to-day business. Often times the reliance on third-party services creeps up without anyone really realizing it. One day you wake up and find most of your employees are sharing files using Dropbox or Google Drive.
Here's how that Dropbox creep happens: your current file sharing system -- if it even exists -- probably sucks. The interface is clunky, difficult to use and lacks support for mobile devices.
Dropbox, on the other hand, does not suck. It has mobile clients for every platform under the sun and it is about as drop dead simple and reliable as you could hope for, which is why your employees are using it to share files and get work done.
Having more productive employees is all well and good except that your files and potentially sensitive data are sitting out there on the web, on someone else's servers, beyond your control and well within the reach of hackers or perhaps even governments that may not otherwise have any jurisdiction over your company's data. To say nothing of the fact that you may wake up tomorrow and find that Yahoo has purchased Dropbox and is shutting it down in three weeks.
What you need is all the simplicity of Dropbox or Google Drive, but running on servers you control. As with services like email, RSS or photo hosting, there are a variety of self-hosted file syncing services out there, but few are as mature as the open source project ownCloud.
There's much more to ownCloud than just file syncing. It also offers file versioning, backups and simple sharing as well as a variety of other services like a calendar, contacts management, photo gallery, a tasks app, a simple document viewer, mobile clients and the ability to integrate log files into your existing systems, handy for system admins. It's also possible to mount Google Drive and Dropbox folders within ownCloud to help with migration or use both from one interface should you need both.
There are a variety of ways to install and run ownCloud. The simplest option is to go with a provider offering a pre-installed setup. I tested ownCloud with OwnCube and had no trouble replacing Dropbox. The downside to a hosted solution is that you typically don't get much in the way of customization options and depending on your needs ownCloud as a whole might be overkill. For instance I already have photo gallery software, run my own LDAP server and am happy managing tasks in my own system all of which means three major chunks of ownCloud are unnecessary.
There's also less control. You may be paying for the server space, but as I argued in the last article, that doesn't necessarily make it any more beholden to you. In fact, using an ownCloud provider really just changes who you're sharecropping for. That said, OwnCube has some distinct advantages over Dropbox and Google Drive, not of the least of which is that it's based outside the U.S. and not subject to U.S. data privacy laws (or lack thereof).
Using a hosted service may be sufficient for many individuals, but if you'd like to go a step further, you can always download, install and manage your own ownCloud instance. The server requirements are minimal, a cheap Linux VPS with a decent amount of hard drive space will fit the bill.
And unlike a lot of open source software ownCloud has nice documentation. I set up my own instance on a local server running stock Cent OS 6. So long as you're comfortable installing software in Linux you can setup ownCloud. In fact you don't even need to dive into the command line; the setup scripts will run right in your browser.
For businesses there's a third option, the Enterprise Edition of ownCloud, which is the Red Hat to ownCloud's Fedora as it were. Go this route and you can easily integrate ownCloud with whatever backend your business is already using (say Amazon S3, or a mix of cloud and local). For a subscription price ownCloud.com offers support to go with your installation, including 24/7 phone support.
While I've been happy with the move to ownCloud it's not necessarily a panacea. There are a couple of pain points, the worst of which is third-party support. All those great mobile apps that offer Dropbox and Google Drive file syncing seldom support ownCloud. OwnCloud offers its own mobile app, but if your workflow already relies on other apps you're most likely out of luck.
It would also be nice if ownCloud were a bit more modular -- too much of it is interconnected and it can be difficult to pull out just the parts you need (which, I suspect, is why cheap ownCloud providers don't offer such customization). I've also found ownCloud to be a little less than completely stable. The innovation and rapid development pace of the project are great for press releases, but less so for day in and day out use. I solved this one by downgrading to ownCloud 4, which has actually had fewer problems than Dropbox in my experience.
That's part of the tradeoff though, taking control of your data means you're going to have to do a bit more work, but at the end of day it also means you're in control.
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