For a long time I only had 1 computer. This meant that I felt no need to keep my information in a cloud provider, instead I would make physical backups to another hard drive every now and then. I often wondered if I should back things up more but never did.

My brother in law runs a nextcloud instance on his home network, which I've used on and off to store things that I wanted to keep but didn't necessarily want physically. Eventually I started using it as a backup, occasionally uploading my entire documents folder to the cloud at once.

Neither of these are very good ways of keeping data secure, but what it took to get my habits to change was getting a new laptop. A brand new shiny gaming laptop, in addition to my old laptop which I'd be keeping around for pretty much everything that wasn't gaming.

On my gaming laptop I started learning blender. I thought it would be nice to be able to work on my blender projects on either device. The old laptop isn't nearly as powerful as the gaming laptop but it's also not a piece of crap, so it could definitely handle the lighter stuff. But how would I sync my files between my 2 laptops? Perhaps there could be some cloud based solution to this? Oh yeah, nextcloud made apps for this exact situation.

After starting it for blender I quickly realized I could use it for all kinds of files I have. At this point pretty much everything from my code to my schoolwork to my wallpapers has been synched up and it's incredibly convenient. It also gives me peace of mind knowing if one laptop craps out, I have my data available on the other one at all times. I've been enjoying it enough that if he ever can't keep his nextcloud instance running for some reason, I'll just put up my own.