For thirteen years, my iPhone backed up to iCloud. Photos, videos, contacts, calendars, Health data, and years of personal history lived behind Apple's backup and sync system. My iCloud storage was about 380GB at last count, which put me on the $9.99/month 2TB plan.
Six months ago, I moved the largest parts of that backup footprint — Photos, Videos, Contacts, Calendars, and selected Health data — to a Mac mini in my basement.
The Mac runs a HostAnywhere Storage Server. My iPhone backs up to it end-to-end encrypted: the data is encrypted on the phone, the Storage Server stores only ciphertext, and the backup payloads are stored on hardware I own.
I'm the founder of HostAnywhere, so this is dogfooding. But it is also a real field report: what worked, what did not, and where self-hosted phone backup is still not the same thing as iCloud Backup.
The setup
I'll skip the long version because the docs cover it. The short version:
- The Mac mini runs the HostAnywhere desktop agent and the Storage Server. The agent gives the Mac mini a mesh IP (
100.64.10.4). The Storage Server is a small local process that holds encrypted blobs. - My iPhone runs the HostAnywhere iOS app. The app is signed in to my account.
- In the iOS app's Backups tab, I enabled Photos, Videos, Contacts, Calendars, and Health.
- The phone now uploads encrypted blobs to the Mac mini whenever it's on Wi-Fi and not in use.
All of this runs on the HostAnywhere Free tier. The Storage Server and Backups features aren't gated behind a paid plan — Free covers up to 10 devices and 3 members, which is enough for a small family's phones plus a host machine.
There's no separate backup software, no Photos library export, no Apple Configurator. The phone talks to the Mac mini over the mesh, end to end.
What this is not
This is not a full replacement for iCloud Backup.
HostAnywhere backs up the categories the iOS app can access with user permission: Photos, Videos, Contacts, Calendars, and Health. It does not back up Messages, Notes, Safari history, app data, iOS settings, Keychain, or the full system image of the phone.
For those, I still keep iCloud Backup enabled on the free 5GB tier. That's enough capacity for the system-level data Apple controls, since the heavy footprint (photos and videos) lives on my Mac mini now.
What works
Photos and Videos
The headline use case. My phone has 47,000 photos and 2,100 videos in the camera roll. All of them now live on the Mac mini as encrypted blobs. The Library tab in the iOS app lets me browse them by date, search by month, and tap one to restore.
The upload is incremental. The phone keeps a manifest of what it's already sent; new photos go up the next time the phone is idle on Wi-Fi. Re-running a backup after taking 10 new photos uploads 10 new blobs, not 47,010.
Speed is bound by my home Wi-Fi and the Mac mini's disk. For the initial sync — all 380GB — I plugged the phone into a USB-C charger on the same desk as the Mac mini and let it run overnight. It took about 14 hours. After that, daily syncs are unnoticed.
Your first sync time will depend heavily on your Wi-Fi speed, phone model, server disk, and whether iOS keeps the app active long enough to complete large transfers. The 14-hour number is a single data point from my setup, not a guarantee.
Contacts and Calendars
These are small (mine are about 800KB combined). They back up quickly, restore quickly, and survive cleanly across phones. When I got a new iPhone last month, restoring contacts and calendars from the Mac mini took 11 seconds.
Health data
This was the one I cared most about. Apple Health data — workouts, heart rate, sleep, blood pressure, every metric the Watch records — can be difficult to manage outside Apple's backup and migration flows. I wanted a backup path I could verify on my own storage, rather than only trusting a platform-level restore.
HostAnywhere backs up Health data as a series of encrypted blobs. Restoring it on a new phone has worked for me twice (once intentionally, once after my partner's phone was replaced under warranty). It's not magic; Health data is now backed up as encrypted data on storage I control, with restore behavior I can test.
Health backup requires explicit iOS permissions, and the app only reads the categories you opt into. If a user doesn't opt in to Health, it doesn't get backed up.
Restore on a new phone
I bought an iPhone 17 Pro in April. Setup:
- Set up the phone with my Apple ID (no iCloud restore — chose "Don't transfer apps and data").
- Installed HostAnywhere from the App Store, signed in.
- Library tab → Restore. Selected the categories I wanted. Tapped go.
It took about 9 hours over Wi-Fi for the photo restore. Health, contacts, calendars came back in minutes. The phone was usable during the photo restore; the app continued downloading as iOS allowed background activity, and I could keep using the phone during the restore.
The result was an iPhone with my photos, videos, contacts, calendars, and Health data restored from my own hardware. It was not a full system restore — apps, app data, Messages, Notes, Safari history, settings, and Keychain came from iCloud Backup, which I'd kept on the free 5GB tier specifically for that. HostAnywhere covers the categories it can; iCloud Backup covers the system-level pieces only Apple can.
A second Storage Server, on a Raspberry Pi
A few months in, I added a second Storage Server for redundancy. The setup is a Raspberry Pi 5 sitting on a shelf in the office with a USB-attached SSD as its data drive. The HostAnywhere Storage Server runs on Mac, Linux, or Windows, so a Pi is fine. Hardware cost: about $80 for the Pi 5 and $40 for the USB SSD.
Both Storage Servers — Mac mini and Pi — sit on the mesh. The iOS app replicates encrypted blobs to both. If the Mac mini is offline (power outage, macOS update reboot, kernel panic), my phone keeps backing up to the Pi. If a disk on either machine fails, the other server still has the data. Both servers would need to fail before I lost the backup copies — and even then, the phone still has the originals unless the phone is also lost, damaged, or wiped.
This is the part iCloud doesn't have an obvious analog for. Apple's data centers presumably replicate my data internally, but I don't see it, can't audit it, and can't add to it. With self-hosted Storage Servers, I decide how many redundant copies exist and on what hardware. Adding a third server later — maybe at a friend's house on the mesh — is a one-time setup, not a billing decision.
For true disaster recovery, at least one Storage Server should live outside the same physical location. Two servers in the same house both go down in a fire, a flood, or a long power outage. A third server at a parent's house, a friend's place, or a small VPS removes that single point of failure. I haven't done this yet, but it's on the list.
What doesn't work
Being honest, because anything else would be sales copy.
Messages, Notes, and Safari data
I don't back these up. HostAnywhere doesn't have iOS access to Messages, Notes, or Safari history — Apple keeps those locked to iCloud Backup, which is the system-level backup mechanism only Apple controls.
I still use iCloud Backup for these (on the free 5GB tier, which is enough for non-photo data). It's the one piece of iCloud I haven't been able to replace.
App data for third-party apps
Same constraint. If a third-party app stores its data on the phone, HostAnywhere doesn't see it. If you want a full "phone restore from scratch" experience, you still need iCloud Backup or a local Finder/iTunes backup for the system-level data.
What HostAnywhere does is replace iCloud Photos, Contacts, Calendars, and Health — the big data sets that drove me to the 2TB iCloud plan. The "everything else" part stays on a 5GB free iCloud tier.
The Mac mini being offline
If my Mac mini is off (power outage, I tripped over the cable, macOS update reboot), the iPhone can't upload. It queues the changes and uploads them when the Mac comes back. This is fine for normal operations, but it means I need to actually keep the Mac mini up. iCloud doesn't have this problem — Apple's servers are always there.
I solved it with a UPS and a monitoring alert. Not hard, but it's now my problem.
Storage limits are mine
iCloud's 2TB tier felt infinite because 2TB is far away when you're using 380GB. The Mac mini has 4TB total, but it's also where my video library lives, where my Time Machine backup lands, and where various other things accumulate. When my partner started backing up her phone too, our combined photo footprint plus existing usage put me at 1.8TB used, and I started thinking about how I'd add storage.
iCloud just kept billing me. The Mac mini doesn't grow on its own.
The encryption story
This is the part I checked carefully before trusting any of it.
When my iPhone uploads a photo, the iOS app encrypts it on-device with AES-256-GCM. The encryption key is derived on the device and never leaves it. The Mac mini and the Pi receive only ciphertext. The docs cover the exact key derivation and recovery model.
What this means concretely:
- The Mac mini and Pi see only ciphertext. If either gets stolen, the photos are gibberish to the thief.
- HostAnywhere's central servers never see backup data at all — the phone talks directly to a Storage Server over the mesh.
- I, as the founder of HostAnywhere, also can't decrypt my own users' backups. The keys are derived on each user's device and stay there. This is by design.
The trade-off: recovery responsibility
End-to-end encryption is a real protection against server compromise, but it has a cost.
If the only device with the decryption key is lost before another trusted device is set up, encrypted backup blobs may not be recoverable. The Storage Server cannot help recover data without the key, and neither can HostAnywhere. This is the same trade-off as iCloud's Advanced Data Protection, Signal, ProtonMail, or any other end-to-end encrypted service — the privacy property only works if the vendor genuinely can't bypass it.
The docs describe the supported recovery flows. Before relying on this as your only backup of irreplaceable data, read those.
The cost accounting
Six months in:
- iCloud 2TB: $0/mo (downgraded to free 5GB tier for Messages + iCloud Backup of system data)
- HostAnywhere: $9/mo for the Developer plan — but the Storage Server and Backups features are included in the Free tier. I pay for Developer because I also use the mesh, public service URLs, and posture features. If I only wanted backups, this would be $0/mo
- Mac mini electricity: ~$2/mo (it's a 7W idle machine)
- Raspberry Pi 5 electricity: under $1/mo (3W idle)
- One-time hardware cost: $599 Mac mini three years ago, $80 Pi 5 + $40 USB SSD added recently
I spent $120/year on iCloud before. I now spend about $132/year all-in. The cost is roughly flat in dollar terms — I'm paying for HostAnywhere Developer (which I'd be paying for anyway for the mesh + tunnels), but the iCloud line specifically dropped from $120/year to ~$0.
If you only want phone backups and aren't already a HostAnywhere customer, the math is different: Storage Server and Backups are part of the Free tier, so the only ongoing cost is electricity for the storage hardware you already own. That's the framing that landed for my partner, who only cares about her photos and contacts being backed up — for her, the change is "iCloud line gone, electricity unchanged."
This is not a story about saving a huge amount of money. It is a story about moving the marginal backup cost onto hardware I already own and getting control over where the backup data lives.
Try it
Try HostAnywhere Free at hostanywhere.io — 10 devices, no credit card. The free tier supports phone backups; you'll need a Mac, Windows, or Linux machine to host the Storage Server.