I completely understand, but how will they access it? Over something like teamviewer where you can also see the screen and control the mouse keyboard would be preferable to ssh access where you have no idea whats happening until it’s over.

On the other hand, whatever he’s going to do he should hopefully know beforehand, otherwise it just sounds like a fishing session to try a few things.

$6 x 14Tb = $84 month x 12 months = $1008 per year, or did I miss read the prices?

How much are you backing up? Admittedly backblaze looks cheap but at $6 Tb leaves me with $84 pcm or just over $1000 per year.

I’m seriously considering a rpi3 with a couple of external disk in an outbuilding instead of cloud

Why limit yourself to just your phone, use a pi-hole and block ads for your whole network.

And when I’m out, I have a vpn running on the phone back to my home network and block ads on 4g/5g as well

A few I’ve not seen mentioned -

Clue Remo unarmed and dangerous Dead men don’t wear plaid Taken Tremors 1 & 2, not the rest North by northwest Stardust