IRC and photos should have a one-click button to set up encrypted backups to a location of your choosing, local, remote, cloud. Ideally, of course, you’d configure this location once and then all apps would automatically use it.
As for physical games, this is not a comparable example (physical self-managed vs virtual self-managed). In this case, you’d virtually back up the disk, and if you can’t because of DRM or something, then you don’t really own it.
Your comment on self-hosted + paid-hosted I especially agree with and is one that I’ve quite recently also came to the conclusion of.
No... they just match up with expectations of what I said: You need backup solutions. Those backup solutions need to work, need to be recoverable. And when a disaster happens, let's say there's a fire at my house, the last thing I want to be doing is spending hours recovering backup. That's a sysadmin's job, not mine.
I don't know why you say IRC "should have a one-click button to set up encrypted backups to a location of your choosing" -- that's not the case of any existing service to my knowledge, possibly not even for photos. And I also wouldn't expect every single self-hosted service developer out there to have to set up something like that, especially given that the development of such a thing requires pretty extensive sysadmin knowledge and self-hosted projects tend to be open-source-volunteer ones.
I'd love to have more things work like git though. Easy mirroring. Decentralized truth. In some way, IPFS, but not for like the entire internet; just for select projects.
The opposite is true as well:
> Also, all your data is stored on a database that you control, so you'll eventually lose them (unless you apply the same rigor in system administration, backups and security that large companies would).
I used to always host everything myself. I knew the risks, and I knew they would bite me some day, but I wanted to learn. I don't regret this choice.
But the day I lost my 10 years of IRC chat history was the day I subscribed to IRCCloud instead.
The day I lost all the photos I took with my mom on some trip was the day I started heavily using Google Photos.
Even long before that, the day I lost my only physical copy of my favourite game was the day I bought it back on GOG.
Life's too short to care about this stuff for more than the learning experience. Using cloud services is a fucking immense productivity gain. Of course I still encourage people to run their own stuff, and I 100% back self-hosted alternatives (they're important).
The best services in my experience provide self-hosted + paid hosted service. Those are the ones you can really trust. You choose your trade-off based on your use case, and you are very likely to get the advantage of data portability. Paying money for it also ensures you're less likely to get screwed by their whims.