I am very interested in moving my photos and data to a self-hosted solution but am a little anxious about backups.

Do you simply trust hetzner to not lose the data on your 1TB storage box?

(I am aware that I am currently trusting google and dropbox to do just that.)

Set up your Hetzner boxes in a European location so that they are in the same network zone. Activate automatic snapshots and Hetzner does 7 snapshots (a full image of your box) a day. The snapshot is never saved at the same location as the server running your box, but at one of the other locations in the same network zone.

To be fair if both google and dropbox can't take care of 1TB of data, who can?

My solution against photo anxiety is to actually look at them and decide to physically print the best ones every year. More likely to be used as gifts or just fun to look through them in a photo album, nobody is going to sit next to you on a phone or computer but bring out an old photo album and everyone is on it.

It is still viable to self-host everything from photos to mail yourself and sync to cloud/storage services as disaster recovery. It helps if you have an infrastructure background but anyone can set this up. Never trust just one service; no company is too big to fail and durability is always best effort, even if that effort is very good. Mail is the most annoying service to self-host, not because it's technically difficult but because deliverability is a long-term reputation function that easily deteriorates from misconfiguration or neglect. Nevertheless I've been my own MX and storage provider since the early '90s and it's too late to change my ways now, you just have to keep up with the gold standard as it varies.

The biggest hazard, especially if the whole family uses your stuff, is key-person risk, since infrastructure requires maintenance. The second biggest is being out of your depth in securing it.

My only regret in all my years of self-hosting was that time I returned a portable /24 to APNIC. Still stings even if it was the right thing to do, civically speaking.

I retain gmail & hotmail accounts for deliverability checks and as signup swamps.

> Do you simply trust hetzner to not lose the data on your 1TB storage box?

I don't! I haven't set it up yet, but my plan is to set up a daily cron job to use rsync to copy the photos down to a physical hard drive I have in my desktop computer. This desktop isn't on 24/7 so I would need to remember to turn it on to sync.

It would take something real catastrophic for actual data loss; Hetzner would have to somehow lose my storage box data & all its backups (or I lose access to my Hetzner account), my local cron job would have to fail or the hard drive would die, and I would have to lose my phone which has the last few years of photos on it.

Back it up to S3 glacier, or to Backblaze. The cost of it is pretty low, much lower than a VPS / bare metal box + 1 TB cost for the photo app hosting.