How I de-googled/de-microsofted and you can too

I started my self-hosting journey in 2001 when I bought my first desktop. Before then I used the family computers (a 286 and 486 that we found in a dumpster). I went to university without my own computer and used the school computers for anything that needed it. It wasn't until that summer that I bought my own. Fast forward to 2011 and I bought my first NAS and called it thevault and used it as a backup of all my photos, etc. Like everyone else, I started using google photos (it was part of Google+ initially I think) around 2013-15 and continued to use it even after switching to iOS in 2018. I also used the google suite of gmail, drive, etc for IEEE stuff, Skydrive (now Onedrive) for personal stuff and Sharepoint for my work stuff. Anti-Lockin While I relied on cloud services for my day-to-day I always had a backup process where I would have a copy of everything locally, either manually downloading it or mirroring the digital "stuff" with self hosted services like Nextcloud, Plex,…