Great idea! However, something bothers me. From F-Droid:

This app relies on catbox.moe to upload images and Google, Bing, Yandex, TinyEye, Perplexcity and ChatGPT for search.

I am not familiar with that service, so I went to the website and looked at FAQ:

How long does Catbox keep files for?
Forever. If you don’t want your file to stick around until the heat death of the universe, use Litterbox.

Are you (F)(L)OSS?
no.

Not sure what it is exactly but having my uploaded files stored in some obscure database until the heat death of the universe does not fill me with trust.

I have a Pixel phone and used the screen scanning tech (forgot how it’s called, but it’s the same feature, I believe) for OCR to copy the WiFi password from a photo of the sticker that’s on the router and of course it immediately sent that password to Google and run the search, ugh. I don’t want to send my WiFi password to some website I never even heard about, either.

Can you explain how it works?

Thanks!

May I ask which Hetzner VPS did you choose? I wonder if the Cost-Optimized ones are sufficient. I would be using it with max 2 users, same as you.

If I go with the VPS option I’d like to host Immich instead. But it seems to be hungry for memory, especially with the ML features enabled.

I really don’t understand this “Nextcloud does too much” rhetoric, the standard bare metal installation is basically just Files, Photos, Calendar and Contacts

That’s just my impression based on their website, it looks like a business suite, but I’m probably looking at it wrong. Thank you, the part about the database is important.

A bonus question regarding the 3-2-1 backup strategy. If my VPS is in Germany, but I spin up a Storage Box in Finland, that falls within the boundaries of “off-site backup”, even if both are managed by Hetzner. What do you think? It’s just easiest to setup, I guess. Otherwise I need another cloud provider (perhaps some S3 object storage).

I was looking at this self-hosting guide and scratching my head in confusion. They say $80 nets you a 4TB HDD. Meanwhile, in my country that costs more like $220+. Yes, for an HDD, not SSD (that would be more like way over $500). I see the guide has been updated this year, so either the US lives in another world or nobody has updated the pricing.