marco's blog

In recent weeks, like many others, I’ve been contemplating where my digital data and the services I use are actually located. Predominantly, they reside on servers located in the United States, owned by American tech companies. Given the current political climate, I’ve made an effort to migrate much of my digital life to services within the European Union. To begin this digital relocation, I’ve gone through my current services. My encrypted online backup is hosted on Microsoft’s OneDrive. I use iCloud for emails, calendars, contacts, photo storage, passwords, music, and video streaming. I also rely on iCloud for file storage. Apple services are exceptionally well-integrated into the operating systems I use. The Family Sharing features they offer are awesome, and the stability is now commendably robust. Allegedly, most of these services are end-to-end encrypted. All seems fine, except for recent developments involving Trump, Tim Cook’s support of him and the general attitude of Apple towards the European government. But I don’t want to get too political at this point 😎. Anyhow, I made a table in my BuJo¹ and started looking around and testing stuff. Here are the results, including not only servers and services but also related stuff:

• Address book → NextCloud
• AI → Mistral (?)
• Blogging → Micro.blog w/ European server
• Calendar → NextCloud
• Cloud Storage → koofr.eu & NextCloud
• DNS resolver → my local ISP
• E-Mail → posteo.de
• Home assistant → tbd
• Maps → OpenStreetMap, OsmAnd, Guru Maps (still WIP)
• Messaging apps → Signal, Threema
• Music streaming → tbd
• Online shopping → no more purchases via Amazon
• Password manager → 1Password
• Pictures → recent albums on NextCloud, encrypted backup on koofr.eu
• Route planner → bikerouter.de
• Search engine → Kagi (still US-based but better privacy than Google)
• Social networks → social.lol
• TV/Movie → tbd

A few things were quite simple, at least after I made a decision. Based on very helpful feedback on Mastodon, I found out that NextCloud can be quite well used as a managed service at Hetzner for a reasonable amount of money. I then set up an instance there and moved all my calendars, address book², tasks³, and a few files and pictures. I still need to spend some time researching encryption on NextCloud and understanding its implications, but overall, it was very easy to set everything up and configure it for the whole family, including calendar sharing, and so on. What I’ve seen so far, I like very much. Even the macOS and especially iOS apps are quite good and you can use passkeys and add two-factor for web authentication. Files that are too sensitive to be stored in the cloud without E2EE, I have saved in a koofr.eu vault. Unfortunately, that’s not quite as simple; you have to use rclone, which is a CLI program, but it’s generally doable. For now, I’ve moved a few backups of my most important data there, which have so far been backed up on OneDrive with Arq⁴. I exported all the individual photos from my Apple Photo.app library and copied them to an encrypted koofr vault. This went extremely well with the PhotoSync app, which not only supports WebDAV but also encrypted rclone targets.⁵ How and where I will store my photo roll un the future, I do not know yet; it’s still the biggest challenge. But, I was very pleased to see that a few weeks ago Micro.blog, which is still my blogging platform of choice, offered its users the option to move their blog’s data to European servers, which I did right away. My Obsidian data has felt like it’s been on European servers for years now, and I was thrilled to see that the instance of my only remaining actively used social network, Mastodon, was moved to European servers as well. Regarding maps and route planning, I am now trying to rely solely on OpenStreetMap-based services and apps like OsmAnd, or perhaps Guru Maps. Furthermore, due to the sale of Komoot, which, while still a European company, no longer earns my trust for other reasons, I’ve started switching to bikerouter.de. I already knew that it’s fantastic, but it has a considerably steeper learning curve. I moved my passwords back from Apple’s password app to 1Password. I’m not entirely happy with it⁶ but after all, it seems to be mainly a Canadian-based company. For email, I’ve been using Posteo, a German provider, and I am very satisfied with it. Regarding search, I haven’t found a European provider yet that I want to use, but I’ve been using Kagi for a few months and hope that their privacy statement holds up. Searching remains an open issue. Additionally, I’ve canceled my YouTube Premium subscription and am trying not to buy anything from Amazon anymore. Maybe I’ll just have to delete my account there to keep this up. We’ll see. To sum it up, I find it very unfortunate that it had to come to this and hope that despite the lack of integration, the various apps and services will still work as reliably as they have. Time will tell for sure.