Recommend you follow the 321 backup strategy. Adopted to modern times I would say it is broadly:

• Have your data in more than 1 place
• Use more than one provider
• One of your types of backups should be physical media like an external hard drive.

From what you described if apple was to wipe your data[1] you would be completely out of luck.. for example if something deletes data in your Mac and then that deletion gets synced... For the most part syncing data is not a backup.

Lastly, recommend you try to put all your critical data in one folder, or identify folders with critical data and prioritize backup of those first while you figure out the rest.

[1] Not only can a deletion "sync" from your mac, but there can be any number of issues.. like a bad update to a file. There is also the possibility, no matter how small, that apple could wipe your data. Over time you always see news of "company X deleted entire set of data for user/company Y".

I pay for a Hetzner Storage Box which serves as a Restic backup point for my password database and my Paperless documents.

I recently did a big expansion on my home networking infrastructure, and backups were one of bigger triggers.

My setup is based on a local NAS + Hetzner storage box. The NAS runs Immich, Paperless, and the arr stack. Immich and Paperless back up to the storage box via borg, along with the configuration and docker files, but not the media. I either have physical copies of that or don’t really care because I can just download it again.

My computers also back up to the storage box via borg, except for the Photos, Music and Video directories, for the same reasons. My partners Mac is currently backing up to an external USB drive, but the plan is to move them to Backblaze for the easy SAF and/or the NAS as a Timemachine target.

I'm a linux user with a synology NAS, and I scan my documents to a shared folder, the process them with ocrmypdf and move them into an archival home.

The NAS is a 4 disk RAID6, data loss is almost impossible if you replace failing disks promptly. I have a regular backup to an external drive of all the important folders.

I use OpenVPN to connect to my network when I am away from home with Android and my Linux laptop.

I use Recoll to index my documents for full text search.

It's very effective.

I have a TrueNas system locally with periodic cloud sync jobs to backblaze B2.

as long as you're still a mac user the icloud space and sub isn't really going to waste. can you do what you want to do on your android phone by just using a browser? i know you can't do 'everything' that way, but basic file and email access should be accessible from pretty much any device's browser.

I have a NAS with a couple of SSDs configured in a ZFS mirror that backs up to a Raid Z2 storage pool on the same NAS. Again, on that NAS, I run Paperless-ngx in a docker container. Finally, I use the iOS app Swift Paperless to upload documents to Paperless-ngx. All done over Tailscale.

My load bearing NAS has a lot of redundancy but no offsite backups so I still keep some important documents in the cloud. I'm saving up for another NAS that I can keep at a family members house but prices are insane right now :/

If you can follow the 3-2-1 storage rule without using the cloud, that's awesome. However, the upfront cost can be expensive depending on how much you are storing. Just do the best you can using whatever you have available to you, even if that means using iCloud as part of your setup.

I have Paperless on home server and I am backing up offsite to StorJ (encrypted). I have it on TrueNAS that have native support for StorJ so its as easy as setting credentials and and filling a few form fields. I back up all of my non-media data there and it costs me less than 5 bucks per month. I realize you have different setup, this is just an example what I do. You can still spin up Paperless in LXC and make sure you back up to some offsite storage. You mention Proton Drive, that is another option if you really just need storage. They have data redundancy so the chance you will loose your data is virtually zero. Make sure you have recovery email though, if you forget your password no one can help you if you don't have recovery email.

To help with the overwhelm, If you scanned these important documents then I'm presuming you still have the (paper?) originals?

Treat them as your source of truth and work with them first - some might have superceeded your backups anyway.

Then, as others have said, follow the 3-2-1 principle, but keep one of the backups as plain and simple files (.pdf I presume)

If you lock the files in an app, you're making it even more difficult to restore them later.

Personally, I put my files (ie. .pdf, .jpg, etc) in encrypted online file storage (Hetzner) and I made sure I keep instructions elsewhere on how to get them back again (in case I'm... not able to)

Keep it simple

Cloudflare has free storage plans if you don’t need too much space.. documents are typically small files.

I just copy things into one place and then copy to cloudflare. Perfect for documents, my gitea repos, config files, etc.

You should be able to use the web version of iCloud to access and download files if needed to your device.

iCloud Web

Another option would be to use Tailscale to access a samba (or NFS) file share on your ProxMox server.

Tailscale

My last mac computer bit the dust a few years ago so I was using my iphone, ipad, and icloud. For mt things then stuff happened and I stopped using iCloud and do not have the money to replace my other devices quite yet so I have a hand full of raspberry pi’s attached to HDD’s, NVMe drives, and SSD’s. I currently have pihole running on 2 of them, I have a pi zero 2 running wireguard so that I can access my dns hosts, but it is not strong enough to access my self hosted Nextcloud on the go, for that I am told I should use at least a pi 4. My pi’s do a lot more than host nextcloud, pihole, and wireguard though!

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.

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