I currently have a NAS at home and another one at my parent's house a few towns over. I don't know anyone out of state that's willing to host a NAS for me. I prefer to have my data in the cloud since me and my parents don't live that far from me and the data is irreplaceable.
I ended up getting a bunch of zooz 800 zen76s on/off switches since it was on sale on thesmartesthouse.com and the reviews on other sites are mostly positive. So far no complaints. They work and the click isn't very loud. There was some drama about connecting them to smartthings but i blame the smartthings app for that one. It would just hang on the connecting screen for a few minutes but would eventually connect. I was going to get dimmers but ended up not going down that rabbithole for the reasons you stated. Also i rarely dim my lights so i'm not going to miss that.
I feel like this is common practice. Synergy between company's product is very common. There are alternatives you can use instead of outlook (ex. thunderbird, mailbird, etc). If you don't like Microsoft practices then you can opt out and find an alternative. But speaking on behalf of the less techy savvy consumer i would be pissed off about this.
I'm new to Lemmy and how it works so please correct me if I'm misinterpreting how Lemmy works. In this example, if i spin up lemmy.fyi in France and the France government blocked lemmy.world. Doesn't that mean that my instance (lemmy.fyi) would lose access to communities and posts on lemmy.world? OR would that mean instead of going directly to lemmy.world i would need to find an alternate route to get to that information? such as my instance would goto lemmy.org which then picks up the data from lemmy.world then come back to my instance?
Cold storage is enough. Most of the data are pictures and videos that i don't access regularly. I was looking at Hetzner but it looks like most of the servers are in the EU. I'm based out of the US so i'm guessing file transfer would be slow. I also don't have experience with Hetzner but if they are reputable then i don't have an issue with going down that route.