I run a Nextcloud instance on a $15 dedicated Atom server, 2x2TB of RAID-1, fully encrypted, with in-file OCR full text search and external backup (compressed a

I run a Nextcloud instance on a $15 dedicated Atom server, 2x2TB of RAID-1, fully encrypted, with in-file OCR full text search and external backup (compressed and encrypted to Coldline) plug-ins, completely replaces Google Drive or iCloud and my data is mine alone - the peace of mind of no one having access to your data or even scraping your pictures is priceless. And the iOS app is really good and even uploads pictures I take automatically. If the 2TB ever turn out to be too little, you can simply attach any S3-like or NFS volume to it, or just upgrade to bigger storage servers. You can get dedicated servers with 4x4TB HDD + 512GB NVMe system disk for 60 bucks or so, which in RAID-5 is almost completely on par with the cheapest cloud storage solutions like Backblaze or Wasabi, although I guess at some point you probably want RAID-10.