Back in January I wrote about my DI.DAY #1 preparations, where I laid the groundwork for regaining ownership of my data. Since then a lot has happened - not necessarily on the days that were called out, but definitely inspired by the effort.

This post is a round-up of everything I’ve migrated, funded and learned in the meantime. It’ll most likely conclude my journey, at least for now.

What I’ve done

UPS for the NAS

Power outages in my area are rare, but data integrity matters to me. I’ve added Eaton UPS units to both my UGREEN NASync systems (the DXP4800 and DXP2800) and configured TrueNAS to gracefully shut down when the battery runs low. It’s one of those things you hope to never actually need, but sleeping better at night is worth it.

Google Drive to Nextcloud

I’ve migrated my Google Drive to a self-hosted Nextcloud and integrated it with authentik. Honestly I use Nextcloud pretty rarely - I mostly view data, and most of that already lives in paperless-ngx - but it’s good to have it around for the odd file that doesn’t fit anywhere else.

Enpass to Vaultwarden

I moved my password vault from Enpass, which became increasingly annoying with its constant upsell attempts, to Vaultwarden. As a nice side effect, this was my last remaining Google Drive dependency, so that account is now truly empty.

Domain move to INWX

I’ve moved this domain from united-domains to INWX. The main driver was that I needed a provider capable of DNS-01 ACME challenges that didn’t charge extra for API access. The added sovereignty is a welcome benefit.

Let’s Encrypt everywhere

I’ve done a lot of work to get proper Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates for all my domains. This was honestly a pain in TrueNAS - clicking together all the traefik labels by hand instead of just being handed a text editor is not my idea of fun. But it’s done now, and everything is properly certified.

Email to mailbox.org

I’ve moved my emails from Gmail to mailbox.org. I still miss the Gmail UI and its quality-of-life features, but it’s alright. I’m also using their CalDAV and CardDAV for contacts and calendars, with no complaints so far.

On top of that I’ve started using Fantastical to get a joint view of all my calendars, which is making me really happy despite the cost.

Outline as a self-hosted wiki

I’ve installed Outline as a self-hosted wiki. I use it to keep track of maintenance procedures and other bits and pieces around the house.

Signal for private conversations

Most of my private conversations now happen on Signal. I won’t be able to fully get rid of WhatsApp since my business life depends on it, but maybe I can shift that to a separate phone one day.

OIDC all the things

I’ve integrated basically everything I use with authentik/OIDC. Most of it was smooth sailing, but Jellyfin was a real pain, especially on the LDAP side. Worth it in the end, but not something I’d want to do twice.

Bringing my partner along

I’ve dragged my partner along for most of these changes. She’s far less tech-savvy than I am, but she really enjoys Immich, Fantastical and Jellyfin, and she’s been generally very supportive of the whole effort. Getting buy-in from the people you share your digital life with makes all of this a lot easier.

Funding the projects I rely on

I also did a few small things to support the projects I use most:

• I purchased an Immich server license. It doesn’t unlock any features for me, but I hope it helps the project live on. Having my photos easily manageable is really important to me.
• I’ve started donating 10 EUR/month to the Signal Foundation.

If you rely on open source, throwing a bit of money at it now and then is the least you can do.

Maintenance

I try to schedule some time every other Monday to keep the fleet updated. Building everything on Ansible, docker compose and TrueNAS makes this genuinely easy, but it still takes an hour or so every month, because inevitably something breaks.

In a less sovereign way, I’ve resorted to using AI to troubleshoot a lot of the errors, because honestly I often can’t be bothered to dig deep anymore. I’m well aware that most of my previous learning came from troubleshooting some weird thing manually for ages, and I still enjoy that from time to time. But these days I’d much rather get paid to troubleshoot customer infrastructure than do it as a hobby.

Almost done with Google

I’m almost ready to cancel my Google Workspace. One more solid Gmail backup and that’s it. Google Takeout is actually a really good help here.

Overall I’ve now gotten rid of most external services, and it feels really good to have regained control.

But it’s been a lot of work. It took multiple full days to get everything installed, migrated and maintainable, and the operational overhead can’t be neglected.

Reflections

I’ve increasingly leaned on AI from one of the frontier labs to achieve most of this, and to be honest, I would not have pulled through if I’d had to do all of it the old-fashioned way in my free time.

That said, I still won’t let AI SSH into my systems or analyze things for me directly. I’d rather have it write Ansible, copy & paste outputs that I’ve sanitized beforehand, and generally stay very cautious. Maybe one day I’ll run this on a local model, but right now the open source models still feel like they’re lagging behind in usability, and I don’t have the compute power (or the funds) to run something capable locally. Maybe that changes.

Conclusion

This post most likely concludes my journey. Maybe I’ll follow up with some lessons learned at the end of the year, or post an update if I make the switch to local AI models.

Thanks for reading - I hope this motivated some of you to get your stuff back under your own control!