It is always a good idea to keep your data close to your chest. Even more so, higher the value and volume of information you appear to be owning, better the chances that you must think about having a proper local storage.

In times when public clouds rule the masses a distinctive new trend is emerging — people start giving a second thought to the matters of long term costs involved in the cloud, eroding privacy boundaries, high definition media usage and more.

Things get quite difficult if you are a photography or video enthusiast, possess a legacy of TV recordings to catch up with or home video library, run any sort of a small business requiring to keep a lot of digital assets handy. And indeed if you want to share any of those things with family, relatives, friends or business partners — then it is going to be even more complicated as most of public cloud storage facilities would require them to sign up or sign in, use only a limited number of content formats, not allow your contacts to stream data out of your storage directly to their screens.

And what if you also want to opt for a backup for your laptops and PCs as well? Keep private and confidential documents, spreadsheets and scans away from internet altogether? Run a home email and collaboration server?

Privacy and censorship concerns are growing day after day. It is already a known fact that all cloud hosting providers like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Dropbox have specialised content inspection units routinely tasked to look into user files (pictures, videos and documents) to identify illegal, offensive or otherwise toxic content. Just recently a case has been taken to US court by former Microsoft employees complaining they had seen too much of extreme user content without getting enough support from employer to mitigate impacts to their mental health and wellbeing. The complaint states that Microsoft’s “file police unit” named Online Safety Team “had ‘God-like’ status and could literally view any customer’s communications at any time.”