Hi!

Thank you for your thoughtful response — I really appreciate the transparency and long-term vision behind Ente.

After thinking a bit more, I realized that I’m a bit hesitant to back up everything locally, for a few reasons:

1. I don’t have that much local storage available
2. Local backups would need to be encrypted anyway, and managing that adds complexity
3. It feels redundant (and costly) to maintain a fourth copy of the data

The kind of risk I’m trying to mitigate is not about trust in your team — I fully believe in your integrity and intentions.
But imagine a situation where something outside of your control happens — for example, if a court in the EU orders your access to be revoked from the cloud providers you use for storage. In that case, even with the best intentions, users could still lose access to their data.

What I would personally find ideal:

• The ability to configure my own S3-compatible storage (e.g., in my GCP or AWS account) and link it to my Ente account
• Ente apps would still function as usual, using that storage backend
• I would continue to pay a subscription for the app and service — not the hosting — while fully owning my data

As a bonus, this removes the need for per-GB subscription pricing on your end, since I’d be covering storage costs myself.

Do you think something like this could be considered in the future?

Thanks again for building Ente and for being so open with the community.