Amara
Cloud services provide many benefits to individuals but they come with many risks: privacy, long-term archiving, latency. In practise, once you’ve signed up with a cloud service it can be difficult to extract all your data and leave.
An alternative would be to use the copious amounts of digital storage now common in homes to address the problems above: keep truly private data under your own control, archive data from cloud services, and ensure low-latency access at all times. Unfortunately, the major issue with this solution is management: cloud services employ professional administrators to keep their systems running, a luxury that does not exist in the home. In a home, those skills do not usually exist, and errors can be difficult or impossible to diagnose and even fix. This problem only becomes more serious when we are building a personal cloud, more complex than just a single device.
The Amara distribution is an experimental Linux distribution that version controls everything from package management to datafiles using technologies such as NixOS and Git. Having full provenance information means that updates, particularly security updates, can be speculatively applied and rolled back safely without fear of bringing the system down.