Sovereignty: Trust No Backup

2026-09-20 7 min read Sovereignty Bas Van De Sande

In a previous blog, I wrote how I replaced HyperBackup with Borgmatic. The reason was that my backups got corrupted and there was no way that I could repair it. Recently I noticed that new backup failures appeared in my mailbox, complaining about data integrity. This is the type of message I don’t want to see when it comes to backups. It looked like my backups were haunted again, time to go back to the drawing table to find out why my backups got corrupted.

Sovereignty: The Illusion of Security without Automation

2026-08-27 6 min read Sovereignty Bas Van De Sande

When people talk about building their own cloud, they usually focus on the cool stuff: spinning up containers, creating sleek dashboards, and showing off a fancy setup. I have to confess I’m no different. There is a strange satisfaction in watching a new service launch on your own hardware without asking permission from Microsoft, Google, or who else in the world.

But here is the dirty little secret nobody talks about: If you don’t automate maintenance and security, you don’t have a private cloud. You just have a ticking time bomb running in your meter cupboard.

Sovereignty: A VPN Outside the Blast Radius

2026-08-13 6 min read Sovereignty Bas Van De Sande

While running outdoor, my mind has all the time of the world to reflect. During one of my recent runs, I was thinking of my sovereignty journey that progressed nicely. In the previous months I tackled a lot of hurdles such as power failure resiliency, robust storage, remote backup, minimal overhead, centralized monitoring and alerting, infrastructure as code, private networking, internet connectivity.

Despite of these successes, a little voice kept nagging in my head. What if the container runtime goes down? What if critical services go down? What if mounts become inaccessible or the reverse proxy stops? I tried to counter argue with myself by throwing arguments as “how big is the chance?”, “If I’m behind my laptop I can fix it”. While both arguments are fair, I realized that if there are serious problems, likely the VPN Server container is down as well. I found a major flaw in my setup. I was occupied the rest of the run. I hate to waste a good run… sigh

Sovereignty: Who is monitoring my cloud?

2026-07-31 7 min read Sovereignty Bas Van De Sande

Chaos, Chaos and Chaos. That’s how I want to describe Last week. How stupid could I be, neglecting maintenance on my servers. What possibly could go wrong!

I still get angry with myself over this rookie mistake. No matter what platform, there is always systems maintenance that needs to be done in the background. On the other hand, as being cloud native, this was something to be expected. On the hyperscalers, maintenance is done in the background, tucked away from the end user.

Sovereignty: Is there a SysAdmin in the room?

2026-07-20 6 min read Sovereignty Bas Van De Sande

For months my private cloud ran like a charm, suddenly my Gitea runners stopped working. In the runner output I noticed the message that my disk was full. Pocket‑ID, my identity provider, had some occasional hick‑ups. This slow decay of my cloud started the day I launched the individual services, no magic fairies that kept my cloud in a pristine condition. I omitted the obvious, I omitted some old skool system administration. Something that you get for free if you use one of the big hyperscalers.

Sovereignty: Getting control over your Source Control

2026-06-28 8 min read Sovereignty Cicd Bas Van De Sande

Don’t get me wrong, both GitHub and Azure DevOps are fantastic development platforms. They have only one small problem that doesn’t fit my journey toward digital sovereignty: they fall under United States jurisdiction.

This means that in the end, I don’t have full control over the intellectual property I store there. And at the end of the day I need to be sure that I have access to my source code, no matter what.

Bye Bye OneDrive

2026-06-12 8 min read Sovereignty Bas Van De Sande

One of the features that drew me initially to the cloud was the idea of having your information at your fingertips. As long as I had an internet connection, I had access to my documents and media. No matter where I was, no matter the occasion, no matter the time of day. Just open a browser, and I could pick up exactly where I left off.

For me, that magic started around 2005 when I began working with SharePoint. At the time, it felt revolutionary. Fast‑forward a few years and OneDrive entered the scene: a cloud‑based file system built on top of SharePoint’s foundations.

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