Cold storage is enough. Most of the data are pictures and videos that i don’t access regularly. I was looking at Hetzner but it looks like most of the servers are in the EU. I’m based out of the US so i’m guessing file transfer would be slow. I also don’t have experience with Hetzner but if they are reputable then i don’t have an issue with going down that route.
I currently have a NAS at home and another one at my parent’s house a few towns over. I don’t know anyone out of state that’s willing to host a NAS for me. I prefer to have my data in the cloud since me and my parents don’t live that far from me and the data is irreplaceable.
I ended up getting a bunch of zooz 800 zen76s on/off switches since it was on sale on thesmartesthouse.com and the reviews on other sites are mostly positive. So far no complaints. They work and the click isn’t very loud. There was some drama about connecting them to smartthings but i blame the smartthings app for that one. It would just hang on the connecting screen for a few minutes but would eventually connect. I was going to get dimmers but ended up not going down that rabbithole for the reasons you stated. Also i rarely dim my lights so i’m not going to miss that.
I feel like this is common practice. Synergy between company’s product is very common. There are alternatives you can use instead of outlook (ex. thunderbird, mailbird, etc). If you don’t like Microsoft practices then you can opt out and find an alternative. But speaking on behalf of the less techy savvy consumer i would be pissed off about this.
Giving big tech access to E2E encrypted messages will give consumers a false sense of security while still selling their data. This has been discussed in the whole chrome incognito article (link). I cannot imagine a world in which big tech won’t use this data to try to sell more. Big tech will always be a business and a business’s goal is to make money in anyway possible. Governments on the other hand can use this to fight crime and stop abusers… but we would need to trust the government to do this appropriately and safely… me as an American have been fooled by this one too many times to trust the government to act appropriately with this data.