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The best option is to remove everything you have from any cloud at this point and stop bothering about the vendor’s policies entirely. I am in the process of do

The best option is to remove everything you have from any cloud at this point and stop bothering about the vendor’s policies entirely. I am in the process of doing that. What I use it for now may be an issue if a regime changes. As evident from the US situation. If someone wants your data they can come and get it, with a court order and due process, not a rubber stamp from whatever incompetent incumbent meanders into power and fucks stuff up. Then quietly via a side channel with no knowledge and effort. Notably without iCloud my iPad is basically useless. So it’s going on eBay tomorrow.

rollcat 2y ago
Well what are the reasonable alternatives? E2EE should normally solve these kinds of issues, but if the full source is not publicly accessible, and the vendor has the ability to silently push arbitrary updates, it's all only as good as their promise. Sync is good. Backup is a must. Neither is trivial or easily solved (unless exactly with services like iCloud). Syncthing is great for photos or music libraries, but I dare you to try syncing your source code trees, conflict detection exists but quickly falls apart at the boundaries. Yes git solves that, but you need somewhere to host your code. Tailscale solves remote access to your homelab (which could be as tiny as a RasPi hanging by a cable from the ISP router), but that's again a vendor you must trust. Headscale exists, you can also go for raw Wireguard, but the setup complexity keeps rising, features disappear, and you do need NAT traversal. Oh did I mention ISP spying yet? So which vendor do you trust with your backups? Good backup solution will offer E2EE; there's rsync.net, tarsnap, etc which are all excellent value for money and are important to consider (vs. homelab hosting) for diversifying geographically (natural disasters are getting more common), and peace of mind (last time a disk failed I just didn't bother replacing it; the next one that fails will have my backups lost). But then again, setup is more involved, and backing up your phone (which always will have very important data on it) is always complicated. Then of course the OS itself. You can trust your OS vendor or distribution with the builds, or use something like NixOS (let's just say you need to learn a DSL). There's also no reasonable solution for your phone, if you e.g. still want to access your bank. To what extent are you willing to trust different vendors? How do you assess the risk without deep technical knowledge? How do you implement these solutions without dedicating too much of your free time?
- fujinghg 2y ago
  You're making it much harder than it needs to be because you're used to operating in 2024 mode. Roll back to 2004 mode. You probably don't need to sync everything. You probably don't need a backup vendor. You probably don't need to change the OS. You probably don't need a homelab or massive cluster to run all your stuff. For me, all I've done is turn off iCloud sync for most of the stuff and deleted the data in the cloud. Backups are handled as before: on/off site rdiff-backup to physical disk. Email I moved to a local provider that runs IMAP and keep nearly all my folders offline. Code? You don't have to push it somewhere!
  - commandersaki 2y ago
    In 2004 you'd be shit outta luck trying to backup a mobile device as most were self contained and didn't interface to pc/mac. Also mobile devices back then had limited storage, didn't have cameras, weren't Internet connected, etc. In 2025, it's near impossible to access your handset as a filesystem that you can simply sync off to your own storage.
    - fujinghg 2y ago
      I don't keep anything I can't replace on my phone. Hell I still use paper for some stuff...
    - unilynx 2y ago
      > In 2004 you'd be shit outta luck trying to backup a mobile device as most were self contained and didn't interface to pc/mac. True but .. > Also mobile devices back then had limited storage, didn't have cameras, weren't Internet connected, etc. which also means they didn't have a lot of data worth backupping 2004 mobile devices are usually either MP3 players or PDAs. Both synced over either a USB cable (or fancy infrared stuff) and were mostly just downloading from a PC. Not much was lost if the device crashed except your Bejeweled progress.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    Things back in 2004 had some pretty big weaknesses. A manual backup once a month? Easy to lose a month's work. Or more, if you're forgetful. A backup hard drive in your laptop bag? Easy to get the laptop and the backup drive stolen at the same time. A network drive you can backup your files to any time you need to? Easy for a virus/cryptolocker to hit your computer and your backup at the same time. Backing up your smartphone? What's a smartphone? I'm not saying I like the complexity of modern backups, but there are reasons for it...

rollcat 2y ago

Well what are the reasonable alternatives? E2EE should normally solve these kinds of issues, but if the full source is not publicly accessible, and the vendor has the ability to silently push arbitrary updates, it's all only as good as their promise. Sync is good. Backup is a must. Neither is trivial or easily solved (unless exactly with services like iCloud). Syncthing is great for photos or music libraries, but I dare you to try syncing your source code trees, conflict detection exists but quickly falls apart at the boundaries. Yes git solves that, but you need somewhere to host your code. Tailscale solves remote access to your homelab (which could be as tiny as a RasPi hanging by a cable from the ISP router), but that's again a vendor you must trust. Headscale exists, you can also go for raw Wireguard, but the setup complexity keeps rising, features disappear, and you do need NAT traversal. Oh did I mention ISP spying yet? So which vendor do you trust with your backups? Good backup solution will offer E2EE; there's rsync.net, tarsnap, etc which are all excellent value for money and are important to consider (vs. homelab hosting) for diversifying geographically (natural disasters are getting more common), and peace of mind (last time a disk failed I just didn't bother replacing it; the next one that fails will have my backups lost). But then again, setup is more involved, and backing up your phone (which always will have very important data on it) is always complicated. Then of course the OS itself. You can trust your OS vendor or distribution with the builds, or use something like NixOS (let's just say you need to learn a DSL). There's also no reasonable solution for your phone, if you e.g. still want to access your bank. To what extent are you willing to trust different vendors? How do you assess the risk without deep technical knowledge? How do you implement these solutions without dedicating too much of your free time?

fujinghg 2y ago
You're making it much harder than it needs to be because you're used to operating in 2024 mode. Roll back to 2004 mode. You probably don't need to sync everything. You probably don't need a backup vendor. You probably don't need to change the OS. You probably don't need a homelab or massive cluster to run all your stuff. For me, all I've done is turn off iCloud sync for most of the stuff and deleted the data in the cloud. Backups are handled as before: on/off site rdiff-backup to physical disk. Email I moved to a local provider that runs IMAP and keep nearly all my folders offline. Code? You don't have to push it somewhere!
- commandersaki 2y ago
  In 2004 you'd be shit outta luck trying to backup a mobile device as most were self contained and didn't interface to pc/mac. Also mobile devices back then had limited storage, didn't have cameras, weren't Internet connected, etc. In 2025, it's near impossible to access your handset as a filesystem that you can simply sync off to your own storage.
  - fujinghg 2y ago
    I don't keep anything I can't replace on my phone. Hell I still use paper for some stuff...
  - unilynx 2y ago
    > In 2004 you'd be shit outta luck trying to backup a mobile device as most were self contained and didn't interface to pc/mac. True but .. > Also mobile devices back then had limited storage, didn't have cameras, weren't Internet connected, etc. which also means they didn't have a lot of data worth backupping 2004 mobile devices are usually either MP3 players or PDAs. Both synced over either a USB cable (or fancy infrared stuff) and were mostly just downloading from a PC. Not much was lost if the device crashed except your Bejeweled progress.
- michaelt 2y ago
  Things back in 2004 had some pretty big weaknesses. A manual backup once a month? Easy to lose a month's work. Or more, if you're forgetful. A backup hard drive in your laptop bag? Easy to get the laptop and the backup drive stolen at the same time. A network drive you can backup your files to any time you need to? Easy for a virus/cryptolocker to hit your computer and your backup at the same time. Backing up your smartphone? What's a smartphone? I'm not saying I like the complexity of modern backups, but there are reasons for it...