[onefish]

Recently I've been playing around with something like this, or really; getting back to something like this. Years ago I was an idealistic graduate student who didn't have any "free" (you-are-the-product) digital service or social media accounts - I used Lavabit (before it got shut down) for email and a couple of cheap VPS providers to run a little blog and IRC bouncer. I had a dumb "burner" phone, a RockBox-based MP3 player, ran Tomato on my router, and ran Debian on most everything else.

I think the main factors that killed it for me, that made me drink the Kool-Aid so to speak, were a combination of getting an Android phone and the shutdown of Lavabit (with all the hassle that incurred - notifying dozens of colleagues, mailing lists, etc of the change). Concurrently with this I had just gotten my first industry gig at a pretty large networking equipment company, on a team with mostly older, mellowed, senior engineers for whom programming was "just a job". I didn't want to seem like a "paranoid weirdo" who had some black-hat alter ego. I sold out.

Since, I've pretty much moved wholesale to Google. I still don't use any other digital services - Google has basically become my one-stop shop, for better or worse. I use Android, Chrome, Gmail, Drive, Music, Books, Search, Maps, Keep, Photos, basically the whole damn suite. It's a beautifully unified and seamless experience. I feel in-general, Google gets just about everything right (I don't use Docs - I still write docs in LaTex, haha). It's quite a 180 from what I had before.

But ultimately, I think this has caused me a lot of cognitive dissonance. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to "get back" lately, but this is tempered by how much control I've already given up and, well, what is frankly a pretty damn high quality and convenient experience and there are some things (like Maps, and Photos) which I really don't want to give up. I also don't hold any delusions that anything I do is going to be "more secure" from any threat model, really. I guess I just miss all the DIY. The creativity and control.

Anyways, recently I've been building an ARM64-based "mini-homelab" around an Archer AC1750 router running OpenWRT, a stack of three Odroid C2 SBCs, and an Nvidia Jetson TX1 (with a 50K LUT FPGA on the m.2 PCIe slot). I also have an ARM64 VM in the cloud. Once that's all set up, I've been considering how much I can "get back" under my control.

[Arn_Thor]

I enjoyed google, and used docs and sheets for budgeting and planning. Then one day it was all gone.

I'd had two google accounts, one created a decade ago on YouTube and later connected to my gmail-google account. I used the same login for both, and could switch between them without problem. I had used my Youtube-persona for most of my google docs work. That was all fine until suddenly I could only access docs from my other gmail-persona. They had without warning or reason changed either the account type or the app permissions for my account type. Not a word of warning, or even a message. There's no reverting it, no one at Google has been able to undo the change or recover my documents.

NEVER AGAIN will I trust any important information to any cloud company.

That was the day I started to take everything off the cloud and access it through a NAS at home (with off-site backup of course). I've never slept better

[icebraining]

While I'm a fan of self-hosting (I do it for email, contacts/calendar sync, RSS, etc), I'd say the problem there was a lack of backups, not the cloud service itself.

People think of backups as a way to protect themselves against hardware failure, but that's a reductive view; their purpose is to protect against systems failure, and a company is a single system. Sure they have their backups, but as you experienced, from the outside this is irrelevant - the system can fail as a whole, and therefore should be treated as a single copy.

Following the 3-2-1 rule, that might mean creating a second Google account with which you share all documents, and some process for backing up to outside Google (even if it's a regular manual use of Takeout).

Using a cloud service that can't be backed up is no different than trusting an hard drive not to fail.

[Arn_Thor]

Very valid point. I didn't think to use several google accounts. That might have solved my problem... Of course now I'm very diligently backing up everything anyway

[onefish]

I guess I'd be curious about how you deal with e-mail, since that was my negative experience with a cloud provider (Lavabit), and I think in-general e-mail is a much harder (and maybe inadvisable) service to self-host.

I always like to read experiences and opinions of people who lean one way or the other with regard to all this stuff, or are at least cognizant of it at all, since it seems 99% of people just use whatever they happen upon first and solves their problem.

[Arn_Thor]

Good question. I'm still stuck with Google for my personal mail, but I use an email client on my PC to download emails and archive them, and periodically do a full download of all my Google content. Not the easiest or most fun solution, but I found that hosting my own email would be a prohibitive amount of work.

[toothbrush]

I don't know if it's worth mentioning here, but i find one level of indirection enough. I have for the last n years paid for various email hosting providers (outsourcing the hassle of set-up, without going into the side discussion of how much hassle that is or not) but been able to switch effortlessly because i own my own domain. I've merely had to switch MX records when i wanted to switch, my emails are all still on my home computer (offlineimap, but i should really switch to whatever the kids these days are using) and my contacts were none the wiser.

[jasonkostempski]

The last thing keeping me on Google is a sheet scripted against calendar for budgeting. I can't find a good open source calendar with an API that will let me query for all events within a date range. Seems like the type of software that should exist in spades. I don't even really need a UI.