Moving your data from one device to another is a pain. It’s enough of a pain that most software services these days offer some kind of data transfer tool when you set up your new device. Unfortunately, most of the time these “migration assistants” are garbage.

I’m in a unique position of having to use new devices all the time, which is both tons of fun and a pain in the butt when it comes to setting them up. After years of doing this, trying new services, and tweaking my systems, I’ve finally settled on a way to have all my data and eat it wherever I go, whichever device I use. Here’s how.

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The core of my system is a file syncing service. I have tried them all and settled on NextCloud, which I host on my own server. There’s a hosted version available as well. If you want a more familiar name, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Sync.com all offer roughly the same features.

Once you install the app for whichever service you decide to use, it runs in the background and syncs your files to a remote server. How this works varies somewhat. For example, Dropbox by default creates its own folder and syncs anything you put in it. One of the things I like about NextCloud is that you can tell it which folders you want synced. You don’t have to change anything about where you store your files.

When you change a file on your device, the service syncs those changes to the server. Any other device also connected will then pull in those changes. This way, you can easily go from working on your phone to working on a tablet to working on a laptop, without noticing that you’ve switched devices. Even if you don’t test hardware for a living, this makes life simpler—you always know all your files are available on all your devices.

The best way to think of this syncing system is that the server copy of a file is the canonical file. The “real” file lives on the server, which is like the library of all your files; you’re just “checking out” those files on whichever device you’re using. If you get rid of a device, your files are unaffected. In my case, once I’m done testing a laptop, I reset Windows (or macOS) and my files are gone from the device but still out there in my “library” on the server.

I store everything in NextCloud, but it takes a long time to sync gigabytes and gigabytes of media files every time I test a new laptop. So I only sync a few key files to new devices, primarily my documents folder and a folder of notes. It’s about five gigabytes of data and generally takes less than 20 minutes to download.