Now, here's an idea...

Gaining control

Or rather - regaining control. Over my own data, and what's done with it.

Currently, I use several services, of which I know they are monitored. Several of these services fall under US legislation, although I'm not a US citizen. This allows several agencies to go through my documents, email and other stuff, whether I like that or not (I do not).

Of course, for some of this, I gave permission - blogging on a google platform undoubly allows google to scan, "in order to enhance services rendered". Or something similar. Using gmail: ditto. Drobox: ditto. MS Windows: Ditto.

And all of these firms store data on US territory, or are US based, which basically tells me my data is being scanned.

Now, I am aware of this, but not overly comfortable with it. I like my privacy. I like the idea of being innocent until proven otherwise.

So, how about taking matters in one's own hands? How about setting up my own email and cloud services?

Services wanted

Just freewheeling here, but how about: 

• replace gmail by dovecot 
• replace dropbox by nextcloud (successor/fork of owncloud) 
• create some virtual/cloud computing platform to replace ESXi. My own Azure, so to speak. 

I do have a previous (not documented) ESXi server build, and I run some 10 virtual machines on it, one of them being FreeNAS - because of it's native ZFS.
This works as a charm, despite the FreeNAS community being.... let's say sceptical, about the idea.
The only problem is that ESXi looses connection, and that is canof hard to re-establish.
So, I felt the urge to build a dedicated, 24/7 storage server. 
This would also have to take care of some laptop storage, and runs 24/7, so it better be energy-efficient. Of course, I'm not able, budget wise, to go for the ultimate option, SSD-only. A mix of SSD and 2.5" drives should do, and I could probably salvage some 3TB disks of the ESXi build. 

Enter Sub-project 1: storage server.