Recent news around the Greenland crisis makes me feel that weaponizing big tech could become a real option. Even though the tech leaders will try to keep their business out of geopolitics if it harms them, the American government might not care about that. The possibility to spy on foreigners is already there with the US Cloud Act. In addition to privacy concerns, this could lead to situations where American cloud providers are pressured to cut off services to European customers.

Compared to this, the privacy issues with American cloud providers seem almost negligible.

Since I don’t want the access to my important data to depend on the whims of a volatile government, I decided to move my data from big tech clouds. My first thought was extending my home lab to include some NAS storage. However, looking into the pricing of German and EU-based cloud providers, I found that they typically cost between 5-7€ per TB and month. Considering that even a cheap NAS setup will cost me around 300€, I would have to run it for over 5 years to break even, not even considering electricity costs. Furthermore, the providers handle backups and redundancy for me, which I would have to take care of myself with a NAS.

So, a Nextcloud instance hosted in Germany it is. Of course, I lose some convenience, like no nice photos and office integrations that just work—some projects for the future :)

P.S. I had AI autocomplete enabled while writing this post and really wanted to fight me. It tried to convince me that American cloud providers are the best option for sovereign data storage.