My gut tells me that cyber-warfare, and hacking into major Internet service platforms, is going to increase in the coming years. Facebook, Yahoo, Dropbox, and Evernote – among others – have already been hacked and had user information stolen at least once. I doubt that any platform is immune. I already use unique passwords on every website requiring a login (based on a formula I can remember in my head), but I suspect even that will increasingly be of little value going forward.

Add in the intrusive scanning and collection of personal information from emails, posts, private messages, and “likes” by Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. – with the associated creepiness factor – and it seems like a decent idea to minimize these kinds of exposure.

Of course, the easiest way to do that is to minimize the amount of personal data that even resides out in “the cloud”, and that’s always the best first step to take. But sometimes it is handy to have some info that’s easy to access from multiple locations/devices, or to easily share with others.

I’ve already brought my email “in-house” and onto my own web host. As part of my continuing efforts to pull my personal data off of the major 3rd party web platforms, I recently discovered a couple of additional cool alternatives – Nextcloud and Joplin.

Nextcloud performs a similar function as Dropbox, but can reside on your own server, and offers data encryption. In fact, it’s one among a few dozen packages that my web hosting provider offers for easy installation onto my server with the click of a mouse. The licensing of Nextcloud is such that it’s free for personal use. They have clients for Windows, Mac, and (most important to me) Linux, as well as iOS and Android (though that somewhat defeats the purpose of avoiding 3rd party platforms). Like Dropbox, Nextcloud allows automatic syncing of files between the client app and the server, and allows for the sharing of files with others if desired.

Then there’s Joplin, an open source note-taking and to-do app. Joplin provides a similar feature set as Evernote, but without a centralized web platform run by someone else. It, too, offers clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android, and can integrate with Nextcloud for access to notes via your own personal cloud.

The main thing I’ve used Evernote for is to clip and save items from the web (tech how-to info, gardening tips, recipes, etc.). Like Evernote, Joplin has a web-clipper add-on for browsers, so Joplin can continue to serve that function nicely going forward. Joplin also offers importing of Evernote notes (after exporting your notes from the Evernote desktop app), and does a good job of retaining most of the formatting.

I’ve been using both applications for a few weeks, and I’m impressed. While nothing online is 100% hacker-proof, I feel a little better about the limited information I do keep in “the cloud” being tucked away in my own private cloud on an encrypted, stand-alone installation, and on a server that isn’t publicly advertised.