There is another important and too often ignored situation: sw availability. Let's say a day BeanCount (my preferred personal finance software) disappear, well

There is another important and too often ignored situation: sw availability. Let's say a day BeanCount (my preferred personal finance software) disappear, well, so far I can switch to Ledger or HLegder, the switch demand a bit of rg/sed works but it's doable. If let's say Firefly disappear I still have my data, but migrating them to something else it's a nightmare. Of course such events are slow, if the upstream suddenly disappear the local software still work, but after some times it will break due to environmental changes around it. With classic FLOSS tools that's a limited problem, tools are simple without much dependencies and they are normally developed by a large spread community. Modern tools tend to be the opposite: with gazillion of deps often in https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ mode. My digital life is almost entirely in Emacs, the chances Emacs disappear are objectively low and even if it happen even if it have a very big codebase there are not much easy-to-break deps BUT if I decide to go the modern path, let's say instead of org-attaching most of my files I decide to put them on Paperless and use them instead of via org-mode notes links with Dokuwiki or something else I get much more chances something break and even if I own anything my workflow cease to exists quickly. Recover would be VERY hard. Yes, paperless in the end store files on a file system, I can browse them manually, Zim have essentially the same Dokuwiki markup so I can import the Wiki, but all links will be broken and there is no direct quick-text-tweaking I can apply to reconstruct http links to the filesystem. With org-attach I can, even if it use a cache-like tree not really human readable. Anyway to have personal guarantees of ownership of our digital life local-first and sync are not the only main points. The corollary is that we need the old desktop model "an OS like a single program, indefinitively extensible" to be safe, because it's much more fragile at small potatoes level, but it's much more resilient in the long run.