I had an email yesterday telling me that the Apple One subscription was going up for the second time in twelve months.
It no longer represents good value for me and I can save nearly £100 a year by cancelling and subscribing to the important parts that I use most.
Apple are not alone in increasing prices (in a cost of living crisis) to the point they no longer represent fair value. What is it with companies that they lack basic business smarts?
I have also considered the ‘trusted friend’ thing. And while that would certainly solve the ‘hit by a bus’ situation, they are my age and not any healthier than I am. I don’t believe I have any/many technically capable younger friends I could rely on as that trusted person long term.
These things are stuff I’ve thought about on/off for a while. Not just my personal storage, but just in general as things move to cloud (especially company clouds) when those places fail what happens? As people die off and have their data locked online somewhere, when they stop paying, or company ceases to exist that stuff is just potentially lost. Meanwhile, I have a huge box of pictures my grandparents took. I’ve digitized a lot of them since it’s much easier to share that way, but the box is still in my closet and will exist after I’m gone.
I didn’t intend to make this so dark :)
It’s scaring me how similar your situation is to mine! I also just finished scanning in a bunch of photos that my grandmother took. I chose to host the photos in the Photos app, and considered for a long time whether I would let that sync up to iCloud. Sure, the photos would exist on Apple’s cloud. But if I die, they can only be accessed from my Apple devices. If someone can’t get into them for any reason, they’re as good as gone, because Apple – as good a company as it is when it comes to customer service – can’t be counted on to let anyone else into my account to retrieve data.
So I stored them in Photos, and will store copies of them on my NAS, in hopes that having them in multiple locations will increase the chances that someone else can access them. Same thing goes with my data – I ignore iCloud, but I store that data on my Macbook Pro, inside of its periodic backup, on my NAS, on the backup of the NAS, and potentially in the future, on a thumb drive. More locations means more chances of being able to get at the files in the event of a catastrophe.
I use Photoprism also as a docker on my NAS. It is Internet facing but I only really share kinks to friends and family since it is hitting my server. Its firewalled/port forwarded etc, but I’m not comfortable sharing that publicly.
Inside our house NAS shares are accessible, however read only unless I need to update/add to it.
Nextcloud runs in parallel to the NAS and contains it’s own data but it’s ease of use allows my wife to use it
One other paid storage I didn’t mention (for photos) is I also have a $40/yr zenfolio account where I do upload photos. Mostly stuff taken with my DSLR not phone pictures. (A lot of soccer pictures). My grandparents photos are there also so the family can access them.