It's always interesting to see how other people are approaching things.

Although I wrote the rest of this last night, I am reminded this morning of how difficult (or at least tedious) it can be to move data between all of the different operating systems we have running. Apple made everything very convenient, we didn’t have to think about anything, but now we find a few more obstacles in the way.

We're in a transitional phase here at the fortress of solitude. Moving away from Apple products began in earnest a month or so ago while at the same time we begin to un-tether from "cloud" solutions as much as possible. We are resolved that any cloud solutions we do utilize must be fully privacy respecting, etc. This is a significant challenge by itself. Primarily this is because fully committed to the Apple ecosystem by 2015 because it "just worked" and we had no energy at the time to solve complex problems at home and at work.

At the moment things look like this:

Two 2014 15" MacBook Pro's. My wife uses hers as a daily driver, I use mine only for school and some music related things.

My desktop that's been a running custom upgrade/build for a few years using FreeBSD primarily with a couple of Linux partitions I don't use much. It’s also been a hackintosh and dual-booted windows for a while for gaming.

An old Dell laptop running Debian/PiHole for DNS resolution with ad blocking and filtering.

Two iPhones, two iPads, an Airport Extreme with a drive hooked up to it for backups, and a Uqiuti edge router round out the "IT" gear that's in use.

As far as synching data of any sort we have mostly relied on Apple services for that in the past. I'm experimenting withGitLab for dotfile and other configuration backups and we're in the process of building up some other services here at home. Trying to do so with the hardware we have available is a challenge but it makes sense for a couple of reasons.

Rather than go into excessive detail on planned services and the machines that will provide them, I'll just say again that we intend to be as self-contained and self-supporting as we can be. At the moment I would say we have about a 40% solution and will be at 60% within a month or so. The remaining 40% will take significant resources to address since we need a fairly robust network storage solution and drives are very expensive. For now the bulk of our data will remain offline on several drives for redundancy.