I’m fairly new to self-hosting and privacy. I used to be all about Apple. I scanned all my important documents and stored them in iCloud. That worked pretty well, but because I tend to make my life harder than necessary, I switched from an iPhone to a Pixel with GrapheneOS. It’s a hassle, but I’m happy with my decision overall. Unfortunately, my files are still in iCloud. As a Mac user, that’s not too bad, but not being able to access my files on the go is annoying.
I’m afraid to store all my important files in an LXC on my Proxmox server, even with daily backups.
Should I switch from iCloud to Nextcloud, Proton, or something similar? Or should I create an offsite backup—one encrypted in the cloud and one in my house? How are others handling this? Would an extra backup at a family member’s house be a good idea? Is paying for cloud storage common? I’d really appreciate any suggestions or ideas. Right now, I’m feeling overwhelmed by all the possibilities. Also, having 2 TB of iCloud storage made it too easy, since I didn’t carefully choose the files to upload. But paying 10 bucks a month feels a little stupid now that I don’t have the comfort factor any more.
I recently did a big expansion on my home networking infrastructure, and backups were one of bigger triggers.
My setup is based on a local NAS + Hetzner storage box. The NAS runs Immich, Paperless, and the arr stack. Immich and Paperless back up to the storage box via borg, along with the configuration and docker files, but not the media. I either have physical copies of that or don’t really care because I can just download it again.
My computers also back up to the storage box via borg, except for the Photos, Music and Video directories, for the same reasons. My partners Mac is currently backing up to an external USB drive, but the plan is to move them to Backblaze for the easy SAF and/or the NAS as a Timemachine target.