tl;dr Renting remote computational power is cool (AWS), but renting remote storage is not.<p>I have a complete history of email archives since I started using gmail (ie cloud), but have lost years of archives from the years I managed email myself.<p>It turns out that companies focused on data storage and retrieval do a better job than me. And that&#x27;s fine. I pay someone to do my taxes and I don&#x27;t build my own furniture. Specialization is a good thing.