Seems weird to have a separate app read sent and received messages? Is it poking holes in the Messages app sandbox?

Consider something like the aoostar R1 with Intel N100. Small and low power like a commercial consumer NAS but cheaper and you can chuck whatever OS you want.

I’ve been using pcloud. They do one time upfront payments for ‘lifetime’ cloud storage. Catch a sale and it’s ~$160/TB. For something long term like backups it seems unbeatable. To the point I sort of don’t expect them to actually last forever, but if they last 2-3 years it’s a decent deal still.

Use rclone to upload my files, honestly not ideal though since it’s meant for file synchronisation not backups. Also they are dog slow. Downloading my 4TBs takes ~10 days.