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Disclaimer: I haven't actually left Google's services but I have removed my reliance on them. I might not be giving you the answer you want. Most of my strateg
by Veratyr 10y ago
Disclaimer: I haven't actually left Google's services but I have removed my reliance on them. I might not be giving you the answer you want.
Most of my strategy relies on a home server (full disk encrypted), a server I colocate nearby (also full disk encrypted) and backups.
Email: I use Gmail my own domain and regularly backup my email to my home server. In the even that something happens to my Google account, there are only issues for a few hours while DNS updates propagate.
Chat: After getting fed up with Facebook Messenger, I set up a hosted Prosody server on one of my dedicated servers and use it to communicate with my wife using the Conversations XMPP client for Android.
Photos: I auto sync photos from my phone to Google Photos and frequently (through Google Drive) pull them back down to my home server. My home server backs these up to Google Drive (unencrypted), Amazon Cloud Drive (encrypted) and my colocated server.
Drive: The home and colocated servers give me a ton of storage to do whatever I want with. I've never used a proper "sync" client however, so this isn't a good idea for everyone.
Search: DuckDuckGo is pretty good and I use it whenever I don't want to use Google for any reason.
Generally: I'm happy to use Google's services as:
- They're convenient
- Google operates in and is regulated in so many jurisdictions that I'm confident it's no less protective of my privacy/data than any other US based company
- It's not going away any time soon
- Tools like TakeOut make it incredibly easy to leave
- tesmar2 10y agoHow do you backup your email to your home server? Is it just an mbox dump via takeout on a cron schedule? How would you restore it in the case of leaving Google?
- dhruvkar 10y agohttp://gmvault.org http://gmvault.org Just used this to backup my inbox the other day. Compresses emails into .eml.gz files. Also has an export option for other mail clients. Love that its a Python package, Installable through pip.
- tedmiston 10y agoIs Gmvault as complete as doing a Gmail dump from Google Takeout?
- dhruvkar 10y agoOnly brief experiences with both gmvault.org and Takeout, so take this with a grain of salt. Gmvault gets chats as well (I'm assuming hangout chats also). A pro I see, is with gmvault you can restore the backup to another Gmail account, right from the terminal. Takeout stores chats separately, not in the mbox file. To restore from Takeout, you need to add the mailbox to Thunderbird (or some 3rd party email client), add the account you want to restore to, and then drag and drop emails between them. Not ideal.
- tesmar2 10y agoExcellent! So you just put this into a cron job and it does incremental backups?
- dhruvkar 10y agoI've only used it once. According to the docs, you should be able to do a "quick sync" which only gets the last 7 days. Set up a cron job for that (after a full initial sync), and should be good to go.
- devinegan 10y agoAn option for this is offlineimap.
- tesmar2 10y agoHave you used that for backing up a Google Apps/ Gmail account? If so, did you just throw it in a cronjob?