Previously on isoul.uk: From Veoh and Justin.tv to Self-Hosting My Own Media — streaming solved the convenience problem, but it did not solve the ownership problem.
For a long time I treated online accounts as permanent.
Why wouldn’t I?
I had used the same main account for roughly two decades. Over that kind of period an account stops feeling like an account and starts feeling like infrastructure.
Email goes there.
Contacts go there.
Photos go there.
Your phone signs into it.
Other websites use it as an identity.
Eventually you have so much history attached to one company that moving anything feels almost absurd.
In recent years I started moving some of it anyway.
Twenty years accumulates quietly #
The strange thing about digital history is how little you notice it building.
One email is nothing.
One photo is nothing.
One calendar event is nothing.
Do that for years and suddenly an online account contains a surprisingly detailed record of your life.
I had old email, photos, contacts, calendars and years of account activity accumulated across services.
None of this happened because I sat down and decided to build a personal archive.
It happened because using the default option was easy.
Self-hosting changed the question #
Once I had working storage at home, I started asking a different question.
If I already run a NAS, why am I treating another company’s cloud as the only real home of my files?
If I already have Immich, why should my photo library depend entirely on Google Photos?
If I can sync contacts and calendars through Nextcloud, do those need to live permanently in a Google account?
The answer won’t be the same for everyone.
But simply having an alternative made me realise how many defaults I had never questioned.
Export first, delete second #
I didn’t want this to become one of those dramatic “delete everything immediately” exercises.
The important part was getting copies first.
Google Takeout gave me exports.
I imported old mail into Thunderbird and kept the MBOX backup on my NAS.
Contacts and calendars began moving into systems I control.
My photos already had a home in Immich.
Only after I had exported, verified and backed up the data did it make sense to decide which old cloud copies could safely be removed.
That order matters.
Privacy isn’t improved very much if the process of becoming more private causes you to lose your own history.
It isn’t about disappearing #
I still use online services and mainstream devices.
I still have accounts with large companies.
The goal isn’t purity.
The goal is making deliberate choices.
There are services where handing over some data is a reasonable trade for what they provide.
There are other cases where I already have a perfectly good system of my own.
I no longer want “because that is the default” to be the deciding factor.
Owning data means owning the problem #
Moving things home creates responsibility.
If Google stores a file and a disk fails, that is Google’s problem.
If I store the file and a disk fails, that is very much my problem.
That means backups.
It means off-site copies.
It means encryption keys.
It means testing restores instead of merely assuming they work.
I learned that lesson through a difficult recovery, described in Why digital ownership matters.
So “I want my data back” isn’t really about moving files from one server to another.
It is about accepting responsibility for them.
A healthier balance #
I suspect my eventual setup will always be mixed.
Some things will remain hosted by other companies because that makes sense.
Some things will live in my homelab.
Some things will exist in both places.
What has changed is that I now think about the choice.
After two decades of letting digital history accumulate wherever a service wanted it, that feels like a useful habit to have.