Guide 1 — do this first
Backups
Once your data lives in your house, losing it is your problem. Make that a solved problem before moving anything else.
Layers this moves to you: Data
Why first
Cloud services quietly do one thing well: they rarely lose your stuff. When you take your photos and files home, you take that job too. So before any other guide, set up backups — and this is also where “the cloud” comes back in a form you control.
The rule
3-2-1: three copies of anything you care about, on two different kinds of storage, with one somewhere else (a friend’s house, a relative’s, or a rented storage bucket).
The off-site copy is the one most people skip. Don’t.
What you still rent, and why it’s fine
Off-site storage from a company — a plain storage bucket from any of the big or small providers — is cheap (a few dollars per terabyte per month) and perfectly acceptable as long as your backup tool encrypts everything before it leaves your house. The provider stores noise. They can’t read it, mine it, or hand it to anyone useful. That’s the difference between “using a cloud” and “being used by one.”
Tools that do this well and are free: restic, Kopia, Borg (Linux/Mac), and the built-in encrypted backup features of most NAS boxes.
What this looks like at each budget
- Tier 0, $0
- Back the laptop up to an external drive weekly (Time Machine / File History), and run a free encrypted backup tool to a cheap storage bucket for the irreplaceable folder — photos, documents.
- Tier 1, one small box
- The small box holds a copy of every device’s files; it backs itself up, encrypted, to the bucket nightly.
- Tier 2, a real home server
- A NAS with two drives mirrors locally; snapshots guard against accidental deletes and ransomware; nightly encrypted off-site.
- Tier 3, the hobby got serious
- Same as tier 2, plus a second NAS somewhere else you control, or a backup server at a relative’s house.
The test that matters
A backup you’ve never restored from is a hope, not a backup. Once a quarter, pick a file at random and get it back. If you can’t, fix that before anything else.
Hand it to Claude
Fill in the brackets, paste the whole thing into Claude (or any assistant you trust), and let it walk you through the rest one step at a time.
I want to set up proper backups before I move any data off cloud services. Devices: [list — computers, phones, and anything always-on]. The data I most care about: [photos, documents, etc., with rough sizes if known]. Budget tier: [0 / 1 / 2 / 3 — see de-clouding.com/tiers]. Comfort with computers: [none / some / fluent]. Please design a 3-2-1 backup plan for me using free, open-source tools where possible, with the off-site copy encrypted on my side before it is uploaded so the storage provider can never read it. Recommend a specific storage provider only after checking current prices. Then walk me through setting it up one step at a time, waiting for me to confirm each step. Finish by having me do a test restore of one file and confirm it worked. Tell me before anything that is hard to undo.