A large department store sold someone an apple gift card that was likely stolen/already redeemed, apple responded by permanently closing his apple account, bricking his devices and causing him to lose access to 20 years of saved media in iCloud
Edit: in the FAQ section he says that he has backups so that’s good. Main damage is that all of his apple devices are tied to the deleted account and won’t work anymore



I couldn’t tell you what I’ve put into my server because I haven’t kept track. But you can do it really cheap, I just went more robust than necessary, built a rack, separate firewall, more storage than I need for the future while I could afford it. Buy used, or recycle your own old hardware. Computer recycling places are great for this.