Guess I am going to be taking my “pro-sumer” dollars elsewhere.

The privacy conscious choice is to not use Plex at this point. It is only a matter of time before they start directly screwing with private library’s.

I use Joplin. They have a sync server you can host for yourself.

I use 2 matching Synology NAS systems. 1 backs up to the other daily. Then one of them backs up to Synology C2 weekly.

All of these types are articles always leave out the calculations of what your time is worth to you and the maintenance costs of spare hard drives and other equipment. The TCO is not just the initial investment in hardware/software alone. Unless you plan to host something unreliably and value your time at nothing. In which case I hope you don’t get friends or family hooked on your stuff or everyone will have a bad time and be back to Google Drive/Docs and Netflix within 5 years.

The reason they leave it out I feel is because once you factor all of that stuff in the $10/month your paying for Google Drive storage or the ~$25 your paying Netflix starts to make a lot more sense when pared with a decent local backup from a Synology NAS for the “I can’t lose this” stuff like baby pictures of your kids. Which blows their entire premise out of the water.

And here I thought I had a lot of hdd platter coaster’s.

I just bought my own hardware and loaded PFSense. Put the ISP modem in bridged mode to disable all of their nonsense.

I set the DNS servers I want in PFSense and that filters down to everything on the network.