Personal Cloud

It kind of snuck up on me a bit over the years. I have got a rather decent collection of computers running for various different side projects over the years.

At home I run a local NAS file server 24/7 for local backups and as a shared place to access files from other computers and TV apps.

My Linux desktop is also always turned on. It is primarily for local development and running services that I don’t want to have on a laptop that goes to sleep such as long downloads

I also have a MacBook Pro to use for work.

Little computers are also scattered around or in closets. I have a couple of Raspberry Pis for single use cases.

Over the years my projects have also required spinning up servers. I’ve always found it a chance to try new technology and so I have spread apps across a couple of AWS accounts, Digital Ocean and Heroku.

Today I found myself spinning up yet another server. This one, to run an Ethereum test node. In retrospect it is something that I would have benefitted from doing weeks ago. Cloud servers benefit from gigabit network speeds and one click access to more performance than I can easily get at home. It would have literally saved me weeks of dealing with downloading and re-downloading, and a hundred dollars on a portable HD.

Funny how back in my high school days I would have been happy with a Pentium 2 PC to share with the rest of my family. Now, not only is my desktop computer vastly better than that old PC, but I am personally running 10+ computers and if I had time to manage more I’d probably be.