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Many cloud services allow you to have your contacts, agenda, notes, pictures and sometimes more, like your own website, on a single server or account. But you can also host this on your own server (a simple Raspberry Pi) or a NAS. You might think that's the safest option because it's at home and not in the cloud. If only it were that simple....
Contacts, agenda and notes are part of your personal and sometimes professional life. It's valuable to you, but it can also be valuable to know everything about you. Pictures are also important and we know many movie stars who have been hacked. OK, you think you're not a star and you're not a potential target. Anything can be used to make money from you, even for a small amount. Even in a burglary, today someone can steal your server and use it for blackmail. So you need to think that all your data needs to be in different secure places. The more a technology is used, the more it can be hacked. Now, with the popularity of Nextcloud or Raspberry Pi solutions, free software solutions are not invulnerable.
It's not easy, of course, to define the right strategy and to have several servers and locations for notes, contacts, agenda, images, documents... with at least one backup. You need to find what is frequently modified (agenda, contacts, notes...) and what is less frequently modified (passwords???) but grows over time (pictures, some important documents). So you can choose different locations, different solutions between NAS, mobile hard drive, cloud... I have chosen not to mix my website with my different servers for all my data. A website is like a shop window, something that is easy to find and that says a lot about you. When I read the logs of my website, I see many attacks to find out how to break into the server. If you can't manage security, leave it to someone who can. And think about the need to "open up" your NAS to the world, if you have one. For example, if you have music for your own streaming, don't do it on the same server you use for important and sensitive data/documents.
The GAFAM have made it easy to store your data on their servers (iCloud, GDrive, MS Drive...). But some of them use your data to know you and to target their advertising. And all of them are very vulnerable to attacks because they are leaders and because you leave too many doors open to their services. One password to rule them all? For example, I was in a room with a lot of people and I scanned who had Bluetooth on their smartphones. I found more than 30 smartphones and if I were a black hat, I'm pretty sure I could have collected some important data. The fewer doors you have, the less vulnerable you are. Now don't forget your car... because car manufacturers are also very interested in what you're doing.
And of course it's important to have different passwords for all your servers and services. So I have one server for personal agenda and contacts, another for professional agenda and contacts, another for pictures, another for my websites, and all with regular backups. It has become an important task in your digital life, just as it was an important task 20-30 years ago to keep papers and documents for your life. You took the time to store and organise it all in files and boxes (or you didn't, but you had to...). It's the same today. But as everyone is different, there are some people who didn't take the time to do it 30 years ago, it's the same thing now with the same risks and consequences. I know the problem in my own family. The difficulty is to keep explanations accessible to the person who can take care of things if you have an accident, but not accessible to everyone.
So think about your risk policy for your personal data. Take a day to find out where your files are, what copy of your files you have and what backups you have made over the last few months. Take a day to imagine what you would do without your pictures, your diary, your notes, your contacts. Not everything is as important as critical data. It's a new year and it's not to let, to get a good resolution.
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