chrisweekly parent
Ok, I hope you take regular backups. Depending on Google risks sudden account lockout w/ no recourse. Everything suddenly gone, "poof". Others in this thread can do a better job than me describing other tradeoffs for self-hosting vs dependence on Google.
Others in the thread also do a good job of describing the risk of self hosting - these tools are buggy, have synchronisation issues, have workflow quirks and sharp edges. For all their pain points, google docs works and it’s reliable.
I’ve had way more issues of unrecoverable data with self managed tools than the major cloud hosted tools. There’s risks with everything, and I only have so much time in the day to spend on these things..
With self hosting tools I have found the key to success is simplicity. When I stopped conflating my home lab, home production, and what I thought I wanted, things just became so much simpler and more reliable.
YMMV of course. I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of self hosters are unintentionally confused about the differences between those things, and it makes an easy recipe for problems.
I find that people justify their own DIY things by fearmongering about Google (etc). Risk is so low with any of the large providers.
It is so rare. Often people want to self-justify their complex, painful homesetup for this kind of rare thing. If any of the cloud like Google was that bad with lost accounts then it would get less popular eventually.
Breaking nextcloud or failing a disk or lost phone is more likely. (Nitpick - Yes, most people have SIM based 2FA - so no problem with lost SIM - and most people are not >100K paid HN bros - that travel constantly around the world. so Google is good.).