Aaron is tired of fighting the privacy fight...

 I have worked in enterprise IT for 22 years and throughout that time I have accumulated a fairly complex mix of FOSS and proprietary self hosted services for my family use. Currently my home infrastructure consists of proprietary virtualization on enterprise hardware (I am blessed with a very understanding wife!) with a few dozen VMs running various proprietary and FOSS services for my home lab, testing, and home services.

Now that we have young children and I have reached middle age, my wife and I have been contemplating and planning for that guaranteed service outage we all must suffer in life, death. We have completed the legal aspects of the plan for financial and estate planning, but I'm still conflicted with how I can ensure availability of our families digital assets when I'm no longer around to provide support - I need an EOL DR plan.

Like me I understand that you abhor the privacy and ownership issues of hosted services, but how do you weigh and balance such ideology to the complexities of maintaining or migrating services and data left to your loved ones especially when their computer knowledge is limited?

Does this affect your choices of what FOSS projects or hardware infrastructure you run in your homes?
Do you feel FOSS solutions reduce the pool of those your significant others can call on for support or data recovery?
Would it add to their suffering at a time of loss to have to also change their home digital experience?

It pains me to say that of late I'm wondering if I shouldn't just 'get over' the privacy issues and use a mainstream cloud storage provider (OneDrive, Dropbox, Box.net, something...), something that is easy for a luddite to use and comes with support when needed. Even staying with enterprise hardware and proprietary vendor services so that a fellow enterprise systems engineer would be able to assist with support issues.

Have you planned or thought about your EOL DR plan and if so would you be willing to share how you plan to secure your most critical digital assets for your loved ones?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this and even those of your community as well if you choose to include this question in your show.

Thank you for your time,
Aaron