[ta76567656]

The main issue with this approach for me is that Google et. al. clearly have much better physical security than my apartment. In exchange for in-principle privacy improvements and possibly forth amendment protection you take on a huge risk of burglaries, fires, floods, power outages, etc, plus of course the workload of being your own sysadmin.

Also, if you're paranoid, your data is more exposed. You can turn off all your devices with disk encryption when they're out of your control (usually) but if you turn off your NAS while your away from home it's useless. And if it's on, physical access, and therefore your data, is easy to obtain by the moderately motivated.

Google is like a feudal lord: they might own you, but they'll protect you from everyone else weaker than them.

[8fingerlouie]

As for physical security, you risk burglaries, fire, floods, etc, but that's why you have remote backups.

I keep everything except the boot drives on encrypted drives, so that in case of burglary no data is readable. The boot drives hold no data or passwords, only enough to start up and allow SSH logins. It's a small chore to login and manually mount the drives, but IMO worth it.

As for physical access, besides the 40kg German Shepherd Dog roaming my house, the same rules apply to access as from the outside: 2FA, and limited login attempts. I do expose more services on the LAN than i do on the internet, but everything requires authentication.

For personal cloud stuff i use Resilio Sync. It's not dependent on a single machine being powered on, and i have a couple of machines at different physical locations (both _mine_, as in hardware and sysadm tasks) "hosting" the data.

[fallenhitokiri]

OP here - basically the same, but with a 60kg SwissyDog which actually is pretty useless to protect the house :)

I can also power down system when leaving for a longer period and simply WoL them once connected to the VPN.

[confounded]

That’s all true. I don’t actually think that anyone is out to get me in particular, I just find unaccountable concentrations of power and authority distasteful (and troubling). So, I try not to encourage them.

I’m interested in self-hosting for autonomy more than security.

That said, the data Google controls will likely outlive Google the legal entity/business-model of today. Including that huge security apparatus. The long-term (say 10 years from now) security of your data is moot if you can’t control it.

Google have been quite good with allowing exports, and promising to delete things (probably more like perma-hash, but I’ll take it). However, they’re increasingly behaving in ways I don’t expect or like. It’s been great, but they no longer seem like good stewards to me.