I’m fairly new to self-hosting and privacy. I used to be all about Apple. I scanned all my important documents and stored them in iCloud. That worked pretty well, but because I tend to make my life harder than necessary, I switched from an iPhone to a Pixel with GrapheneOS. It’s a hassle, but I’m happy with my decision overall. Unfortunately, my files are still in iCloud. As a Mac user, that’s not too bad, but not being able to access my files on the go is annoying.
I’m afraid to store all my important files in an LXC on my Proxmox server, even with daily backups.
Should I switch from iCloud to Nextcloud, Proton, or something similar? Or should I create an offsite backup—one encrypted in the cloud and one in my house? How are others handling this? Would an extra backup at a family member’s house be a good idea? Is paying for cloud storage common? I’d really appreciate any suggestions or ideas. Right now, I’m feeling overwhelmed by all the possibilities. Also, having 2 TB of iCloud storage made it too easy, since I didn’t carefully choose the files to upload. But paying 10 bucks a month feels a little stupid now that I don’t have the comfort factor any more.


I pay for a Hetzner Storage Box which serves as a Restic backup point for my password database and my Paperless documents.
I have a similar setup. My PC has disks formatted in Btrfs, so I get copy on write snapshots of my system disk, then have a local Restic backup on a secondary disk and then have an off-site Restic backup in the cloud on the Storage Box.
Thanks for pointing me to Paperless, never heard of it, it seems like it could be useful. I wonder how it deals with languages other than English, if at all.
This is good recommendation. 👍