I (deliberately) decided in 2017 to make myself (and my family) independent from public cloud providers and SAS. The initial part was quite a bit of work, e.g. Proxmox hypervisor hardware rack setup etc, but I also learned a lot and I must say, every step felt like a tiny relief of independence.

Since about 2-3 years, it is a more gradual progression. I only need about 1-2 hours monthly for administration work, since I automated many of these things:

- Nextcloud (like most of my services) is setup in Docker/compose and updated using Watchtower, except for major updates (e.g. 25.x.x to 26.x.x), where I want to be present

- I update my VMs (LXC) using Ansible; it is a single command that is started daily on my work laptop that updates all 12 VMs

- Backups are automated for the "fast" data category: A maintenance VM starts up my remote offsite backup though IPSEC, unlocks LUKS volume on a NAS and starts the Borgmatic job; after it is done, the LUKS is locked and the NAS shutdown (I plan to replace this with ZFS, too, which will further simplify things)

- The slow data (rync) backup is still done manually, I login every 1-2 month and copy & paste the command. I could automate this, too; but I want to be present here. Also, since ZFS and automated snapshots, I don't have as much need for a higher frequency of backups anymore.

- Once a year, all my data is backed up to external drives that I need to manually connect and then do a `zfs send`, to update snapshots.

- phones, laptops etc. of the whole family sync their content (photos, contacts, files) to Nextcloud; phone stuff is automatically removed locally from devices, once synced to the server; from there they're archived and backed up

If you ask how long the actual backup jobs require:

- I have only slow bandwidth to my offsite backup (5000kbit)

- borgmatic is still very fast, about 2-3 hours weekly

- slow data (rsync) usually takes 1-2 days every month (about 80GB on average change here; for about 5 family members)