One year ago after starting to learn more about Computing as a whole I asked myself the same question, “How do I get more control over my data?”. This is a very interesting question to answer as there are many ways people define gaining control over data as most people refer to having 100% control over data. During this article, I would describe my way of getting a bit more control over data however you may want to look further if you want absolute control over data. Some resources created by creators such as Techlore on YouTube may help you to get started.
Well, absolute control over data can be only done through self-hosting a lot of the services used. Self-hosting essentially refers to hosting and managing your own instance of a service on your own hardware an example being hosting a password manager on a home server. Please also note, that this comes with a very big complexity overhead which is not only limited to backups.
As I am fairly confident in my Computing knowledge, I have chosen to self-host some things. These are the things I self-host and manage:
- Bitwarden
- NextCloud
- PiHole
- OpenMediaVault
My solution is not the best and you will see why in a minute so let’s start diving into it!
Bitwarden – Open-Source Password Manager
First and most obvious, we are going to talk about Bitwarden. It is a free and open-source password manager available for Windows, macOS, Linux and the two phone operating systems iOS and Android.
Why have I chosen this one?
I have chosen this one out of the big sea of Password Managers for two reasons:
- It is Open-Source meaning the code is publicly available for people to inspect and even commit changes if there is something wrong with it.
(I would also like to highlight that Open-Source is not a silver bullet as there is also something called Abandonware which means the open-source project has not received any updates in a long period of time putting everyone using it at risk) - I can self-host it (or rather correctly said a fork of it called Vaultwarden) even on a Raspberry Pi thanks to the open-source design.
- Also can be used without the need for self-hosting for the ones less comfortable with that but certain advanced features are locked behind a subscription. At the time of writing, the price is 10$ per year for a personal account. Press here for more information.
Bitwarden was the first service I have self-hosted and I have not had any issues with it for now. However, as I keep saying, make a regular backup if you choose to self-host. You do not want to wake up with all your passwords lost.
OpenMediaVault and NextCloud – Regain control of most of the data
I use these two on the same system as they are used for the same purpose which is to keep my documents and photos private.
OpenMediaVault
OpenMediaVault is a NAS (Network-Attached Storage) operating system which is also supported on the Raspberry Pi. I use this in order to have a clean interface to manage and monitor my connected hard drives. I also use it as a way to quickly access my project files from any computer.
Why OpenMediaVault?
I have chosen OpenMediaVault as this was the only cheap solution and I had a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ lying around.
NextCloud
NextCloud is a self-hosted alternative “cloud” syncing solution. Think Google Drive or Dropbox but hosted by yourself. This helps me to seamlessly back up my photos from my phone and put them in specific folders based on the creation date. This solution also is used to create copies of the data. The copies are created on my PCs meaning my backup is not currently the best as it is also recommended to have an off-site backup just in case of a natural disaster as explained in the 3-2-1 backup philosophy.
PiHole or Ad-Blockers/Filtering
Advertisements can be a major source of data collection, as they often use tracking cookies to follow users across the web. Using ad-blocking software can help prevent this. A more tech-savvy solution would be PiHole as it is a DNS server that can be used as a network-wide ad-blocker. PiHole can also be used to filter malware websites using the filters available online. Keep in mind that if you decide to also host PiHole, you would have to manually update the filters which is not the worst as there is a update button so you just need to wait for it to do its’ things but the thing that may annoy many people would be the false-positives that a system like this can give hence I would suggest a ad-blocking plugin or even better as it is a great out-of-the-box browser would be Brave Browser.
Final Words
Finally, you can also try services as ProtonMail which is now a more privacy-focused suite competing with Google’s productivity suite. If you liked this article, show it to your friends and family and let your thoughts in the comment section down below!
