It may sound like universal wisdom that cloud is the right place to keep our data, but the explanations are not so easy to follow.

First, cloud is not cheap. Depending on the provider, you pay more than 100 dollars or Euros per year for a terabyte of storage or even less. This would buy three brand new one-terabyte disks each year, to keep three redundant copies of the same data.

Second, there is no absolute guarantee that our data will not be lost in the cloud or accessed by someone else. This does not happen often, but there are occasional incidents that lead to losses or breaches.

Third, we end up having copies of all important data on our computers anyway, so we can work offline and not depend on the high-quality network connection critical for big files. If I have a terabyte of data in the cloud, I certainly have three terabytes of the same data, duplicated to my computers and mobile devices.

So why do we still post our valuable files to cloud storage? Just because everybody somehow believes this is the right thing to do?

With all this in mind, we have created Personal Files. This software makes anyone a cloud owner and cloud provider – just for yourself. It connects your computers and smartphones into a peer-to-peer network that automatically maintains copies of the selected files and folders and securely synchronizes them over the Internet. Even more, there is a blockchain-based metadata that maintains history of all changes made to the files, so you can always be sure the integrity of the data is fully preserved.

And all this is under your full control: no provider necessary, no service to subscribe, no place beyond your own computers where your data are stored.​

The first version of Personal Files has just been released, you can register to download at personalfiles.online​. This initial release is free (for a limited time), please try and give us your feedback.

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