I will wait a bit for email (too complicated), but as for pictures, any software you would recommend? Ideally, the server should run on a Raspberry Pi and has face recognition and automatic tagging.
I leave new pictures on my iPhone without any iCloud backups, make a backup to my PC hard disk once a month, and make a backup to BD-R once a year (and then remove everything older than a year from my phone). I don't feel I'm missing out an anything by not putting everything on some server. Even in the past when I did use automatic cloud backups, I don't recall ever really needing to have access to some years old picture immediately.
I'm not a digi-luditte, I do occasionally send irrelevant pics to family and friends in Whatsapp (which I do assume can be eavesdropped at any moment, so I don't send truly private stuff). But I don't think having every personal photo and video I ever took accessible within a second improves my life in a significant way.
I have Google One account for in person Google support in case shit hits fan.
Shit hits fan, for some reason my youtube account with premium gets banned for scams, despite account only ever used for viewing. So I make another one with premium that got banned a couple months later, again account only used for viewing. The kicker, once they ban your account, you are denied from subscription page and cannot CANCEL premium sub. And you can only appeal decision every two weeks which so far has been automatically rejected after a couple hours. Meanwhile I contact Google One who helpfully forwarded issue to YT team, and their response "we're not equipped to deal with this issue".
Current in the process of taking out my entire account data so I can cancel credit card attached to Google services, hoping it would kill the premium charges without getting the rest of my data wiped. Or all my playstore purchases. Utterly absurd situation. Pretty sure it's fraud, but there's one useful to resolve situation, even in person.