Minimalist Travel and Data Sovereignty
31 Aug 2026 - Richard Horridge
I have recently been very inspired by Jeremy Maluf's philosophy on backpack travel. While my lifestyle is far more settled than his I enjoy the freedom and liberation of travelling both within my country and abroad with minimal bags.
I'm curious about whether a redundant personal data framework is feasible which does not rely on proprietary cloud services and walled-garden ecosystems (Apple and Google). While many of my friends and family members loudly sing the praises of Apple products I have always been reluctant to commit to their ecosystem. However, the data recovery features are undeniably powerful for the lifestyle that Jeremy and others lead.
My personal data philosophy aims to avoid any hard dependency on one major digital services provider. Though I would like to fully decouple myself from any major company's services I am willing to trade full personal data sovereignty for some convenience. Through my workplaces I will end up using Microsoft products whether I like it or not, though I am thankful I don't have to rely on Microsoft or Apple for my personal computing.
I'm not someone who tends to go long without having a project of some sort (which I will inevitably never finish!). While I'm still pretty focused on getting this PhD over the line I would in the future like to work towards having a simple runbook for recovery of my data on an entirely new device, similar to Jeremy's workflow that he recently used. Doing this without a paid digital service provider will be challenging. I will have to use open-source solutions for restoring my data onto a new Linux laptop. I will have to manage and test my own backups and recovery solutions, and the end result will need to be minimally disruptive to my own lifestyle – I don't want to spend all of my free time doing maintenance and admin work, after all!
Fortunately I'm already a regular user of open-source tools such as Syncthing and Rclone. Modern cloud storage is extremely cheap through services like Backblaze and PGP encryption can work around any data sovereignty issues raised by relying on cloud services. The end result will certainly be more complicated but I am certain that it is possible.
What's more, it will give me confidence that my data is safe for the long term!
