De-Googling your life: self-hosted alternatives to Big Tech
The most common reason people build a home lab is to own their own data rather than to save money. This is a practical guide to moving files, photos, and passwords off big-tech clouds and onto hardware you control, including the maintenance it involves.
"De-Googling" can sound ideological until a cloud account gets locked with no one to appeal to, or a free tier starts training on your files. Self-hosting is the practical response: run the same kinds of services yourself, on your own hardware, where the data stays under your control. It takes ongoing effort, which this article is clear about, but for files, photos, and passwords the open-source options are genuinely good now.
01Why data sovereignty is the motivation
The case for self-hosting is not that Google's engineering is poor; it is excellent. It is that the convenience is rented, and the terms can change. Data sovereignty means your data lives on hardware you own, under rules you set, with no third party able to mine it, lock it, or discontinue it. That is the reason behind most home labs, and the three services below are where most people start, because they map directly onto the big-tech products people most want to leave.
02Files and documents: Nextcloud and Collabora
Nextcloud is a mature, open-source replacement for Google Drive: file sync across your devices, sharing links, calendars, contacts, and a large app ecosystem, all self-hosted.1 Add Collabora Online and you get an office suite — documents, spreadsheets, and presentations edited collaboratively in the browser, the self-hosted equivalent of Google Docs, integrated into Nextcloud.2 Together they cover the largest part of most people's Google dependence, and they run comfortably on the kind of mini PC part four recommends.
03Photos: Immich or PhotoPrism
Google Photos is the hardest habit to break, because the experience is good, which is why two open-source projects now come close. Immich is a self-hosted photo and video backup built to feel like Google Photos: automatic phone backup, timeline, search, and face and object recognition, and it is developed quickly.3 PhotoPrism takes a slightly different angle, an AI-powered photo library you can run anywhere, strong on tagging and browsing large collections.4 Choose Immich if you want the closest Google-Photos-style phone-backup experience, or PhotoPrism if you want a library-first organiser. Both keep your photos on your own disks.
04Passwords: Vaultwarden instead of a cloud vault
Passwords are the most sensitive data most people hand to the cloud, and here self-hosting is especially worthwhile. Vaultwarden is a lightweight, open-source server compatible with the official Bitwarden clients — the same apps and browser extensions — that runs on your own hardware, so your vault never sits on a vendor's servers.56 You keep the Bitwarden client experience and the open, audited protocol, while the encrypted vault lives in your home lab. If your reason to de-Google is privacy, this is the most valuable service to move.
Self-hosting is less about distrusting companies and more about not having to trust any of them with the data that matters most, because it never leaves your house.
05The maintenance reality
Owning your data means owning its upkeep. You are responsible for updates, security patches, and, above all, backups: a self-hosted service with no 3-2-1 backup (see part one) is one failed disk away from the data loss you were trying to avoid.7 Budget a couple of hours a month for maintenance, keep services in Docker so updates are clean, and automate what you can (part five). The trade-off is real: you exchange a monthly fee and full convenience for control, privacy, and a useful skill set. For many people that is worth it, but go in knowing you are the administrator now.
06Where OcxlyDev lands
We self-host where sovereignty matters most — files, photos, passwords — and use commercial services where it does not. Start with one: put your password vault on Vaultwarden, use it for a month, then add Nextcloud, then photos. De-Googling does not have to be all-or-nothing; it can be a gradual reclaiming of the data you most want to own, one well-run service at a time, each of which also teaches the skills the rest of this series builds on.