Not everything needs to be in the cloud

This is the fourth post in my series called Hitting the Digital Brakes, where I explore my journey into my use of technology to ditching some aspects of it now. The first post in the series was about the joys of imperfection and in the second post I asked if we really need the latest tech. The third post was on how my e-reader made me a worse reader. And now, cloud computing. When I signed up for my first cloud account, I was so happy. I had lost several files in backup mishaps (failing Zip drives, curse those clunky things) and was happy my files "safely" lived in Dropbox (think that was my first account, at least). Ever since, most of my files lived in the cloud, even my pictures, all 50GB of that folder, last I counted. That's changed now. A lot. Now, my only cloud account has about 8gb in it, maybe even less One of the things that triggered it this change was, of course, the onslaught of AI. I really didn't want my files on a server that might be used as training data (and fearing…