I didn’t take it as a critique of Ente, not to worry! I’m not affiliated in any way, I just wanted to provide some context to people who may be concerned about the vendor locking aspect specifically.

Of course how you manage your media, your needs and your finances are all a very personal matter, I also self-host my photo backup, but I use ente in a complementary fashion, and I don’t backup everything to it. It just makes it convenient to collect, share and aggregate media between ente members and non-members.

Cheers!

In the case of ente, they have gone above and beyond to give full control to their users of their backing up process and backed up media:

• they provide a sync feature from ente to a local destination on your computer using the desktop app. It can run continuously to reflect all changes to your media and its organization in ente.
• they provide a CLI, so that you can program and implement your own export behavior it seems.

To me, it really shows they care about the users and do their best to avoid vendor lock-in.

And I personally feel much more confident in a company when their business model is a paid one. I’m a very happy customer, I have also convinced multiple people who seem happy too.

Fascinating, what do you call the white-red decoration? This is very traditional in Bulgaria and is called Martenitsa and is typically hung or given away on Baba Marta on March 1st, for good wishes in health and luck, until spring comes.

Is it the same /similar in Romania?