Running Your Own Cloud (Not the Google Drive Kind)

What does one mean when they say "cloud?" This buzzword is used to describe so many things. Google Drive is a cloud where you can store all of your documents and access them from anywhere. AWS is a cloud where you can create VMs and store objects and data for pragmatic retrieval. The difference between these two clouds lies in the audience; the concept remains the same: using resources that are managed remotely and without impact on your local system. That's the point of the cloud, and its been around for ages. We've just never called it the cloud. Today, we're going to be constructing the latter: we're going to make our own personal AWS or Google Cloud.

For Pete Sakes, Erase Your Hard Drives!

I get that some people don't know as much about computers as some other people. But there are things that certainly should be common sense. And if they're not, we need to make it common sense. I don't want this to be a rant, but rather I want to create a brief guide on how to safely erase your Hard Drive. I've bought hard drives that weren't wiped and had all sorts of personal information on them. There was one I bought that had about 18 partitions where each one was somebody's computer. On it were personal pictures, documents, even correspondence with what seemed like Russian wife penpals. I'm sure whoever wrote that didn't want that to get out, and whoever maintained and sold that hard drive was very irresponsible and reckless. That being said, I'm going to go over a vast multitude of methods of wiping your hard drive so that before you sell, throw away, or recycle your computer, you know that your data is not on it.