Bottom line, I plan to treat the rented presence the same way one treats a container - there will be persistent storage of all config and storage data elsewhere

Bottom line, I plan to treat the rented presence the same way one treats a container - there will be persistent storage of all config and storage data elsewhere, such that the server can be abandoned and stood up somewhere else with no more data lost than whatever doesn't come in during standing up the new server. If I can manage it, I will encrypt all stored backup data before writing it to the bucket/block store, that seems like a reasonable target. Even rot-13, or whatever is the binary equivalent, will discourage lazy noses. As far as backups, I have many terabytes of ZFS blocks here at home, and all cloud backups will be replicated back here. I wasn't actually aware of tailscale so I think that's going to be integrated into things pretty deeply lol. I'm not planning to run my own email at all, just make sure that all my old emails and all my future emails end up stored on a server I control (ie. my zfs server at home, plus whatever redundant ones I might also have in the world).