I have tried to degoogle my life. I already have a way to get my photos to my own server. But how can I take photos on my phone without google getting their fingers into them?

I switched to iOS as the lesser of two evils. Sure, for all their supposed privacy focus Apple does some sketchy stuff too, but at least my personal data is a little bit siloed this way.

I did run CyanogenMod / LineageOS for several years but the reliability I needed just wasn’t there. This may have improved since then, though.

[delayed]

Bit of a tangent, but +1 for FolderSync.

I was looking for things like backing up my phone contents to a PC or syncing a music/photo library to my phone and the options I found were brittle python scripts using adb.

FolderSync does exactly what I want and just works. No affiliation just happy customer/user.

Proton.

I like Ente.

Leads to people start calling their senator and start pushing to regulate and break apart every big tech... just as they torrent everything (whoops), they will access everything...

I have never been more glad to have moved to a self hosted immich server on an old laptop.

i need to do this. bit scared my old laptop will die suddently and all my photos will be lost

never tried 1-2-3 rule of backups ?

(me neither, but i should)

me neither, but i should

Attach a USB hard drive and create a nightly rsync job

Fire or theft and all is gone. Great advice!

It is, actually. It's the first step of a 3-2-1 backup strategy. For most people, this is a massive, huge improvement by itself.

I wouldn't recommend rsync though, better something that can allow you to get back files you deleted before the last backup.

Encrypted hard drive for theft. For fire, I have another backup that I take periodically and put into storage.

That feeling is your cue to do something about it. Don’t let best be the enemy of good. Automatic backups are great, but if you have irreplaceable data that it would pain you to lose, go get an external hard drive and dump it all on that, right now.

Use Arq to send a snapshot to S3 daily, encrypted with a key you keep safe separately.

checkout https://github.com/restic/restic you can automate taking incremental backups and shipping them to another location (e.g S3 bucket) which are encrypted by restic so not even AWS can decode them.

You could setup some lifecycles in the bucket as well to prefer deep glacier storage for the cheapest storage tier

As soon as AI started blowing up I rushed all of my data out of Google and to self hosted. It's obvious they were going to suck it all up in to their training and analyze everything to build a perfect profile on you. They always were but the capabilities are supercharged now.

Immich + Nextcloud + Dawarich behind Tailscale has been a dream. I picked up a second hand HP mini PC for cheap, 3D printed a mini server rack to mount it in with some hard drives.

I just use a wireguard VPN with a domain name I already had and DDNS configured, what benefits does Tailscale bring for a situation where only a couple of devices need access?

It Just Works

Rclone/restic to B2

Most modern AI models carry watermarks embedded in images and text, so they can know if something is AI or not. These are probably detected and discarded from the training set.

That is nowhere near sufficient.

You can go grab a model off Hugging Face and install ComfyUI and make as many as you want - right now - on consumer hardware. Not watermarked and very realistic.

And there are techniques to remove watermarks as well.

That is a losing battle on that front. It has to be taken on by not allowing for this behavior that Google is doing. Which I have no solution to.