This petrifies me. Google provides an incredibly easy way for me to capture all data that I care about. Getting photos and videos of my kids growing up and keeping them for years is trivial with Google.
And in one little error it can all disappear with no recourse.
I continue to struggle today to find a silver bullet solution for someone like me who just wants to hurl money somewhere and say, "use this money to guarantee that my cherished photos and videos will be here in 30 years"
Second to that is getting locked out of my Gmail. I'd consider that more irritating than losing my wallet.
That's what I do with Google Drive?
If I were to get banned from Google, I'd still have my folder as a backup which I can then upload to Dropbox or whatever alternative.
If I were to lose my folder (My hard drive went bust!) my folder is one resync away.
What is the problem you have with photos, and videos in that sense?
Or are you talking about the Free "Google Photo" thing for lower resolution images?
Google Drive doesn't back up email and calendar your private machine.
Careful with Google Docs & Sheets though. The Google Docs files you see in your local folder are only links, no content.
Wasn't there are story a while ago mentioning: https://one.google.com/ https://one.google.com/
It'll be interesting to see what this support can do..
Anyways, print recovery keys for your account, use 2FA with yubikey or other U2F provider.
You're looking for LTO and a vaulting service.
http://www.ironmountain.com/digital-transformation/iron-cloud-data-management http://www.ironmountain.com/digital-transformation/iron-clou...
I mean, at least they aren't encrypting your data so you must use their services to view it, like what's happening in the paid music industry.
Go to Digital Ocean, make a NextCloud droplet, and configure backups to Backblaze. There you go. Bonus point if you buy a small server and become a custodian of your own data.
It's called Google Takeout[1]. Use it. Download all of your data. Back it up in a place you trust.
[1] http://takeout.google.com http://takeout.google.com
Takeout is great, but it has one major flaw. There is no way to download only data that has changed after a specified date, i.e no incremental backups.
There is also no "Take in". Your data might be all in that file, but without a lot of effort, you aren't going to be able to get it back into a usable form, with Google apps or a competitor.
It's not so bad actually.
The Google Drive files are exported as you would expect and you can just copy them into some other sync folder as is. Takeout transforms any Google Docs and Sheets into Word and Excel formats (configurable), so you don't end up with links into your disabled Google account (contrary to how their Backup and Sync client works).
Emails are exported as mbox files, calendars in ics format. It's pretty easy to import everything using widely available email and calendar clients. It's also pretty easy to put it all back into another Google account, but you're right, it's not as simple as importing the entire takeout zip file in one piece.
What I haven't tried is what happens to files that were shared with you. I would expect that they don't get exported because it's someone else's data after all.
I think if the purpose is to let you move all your data to a different provider and avoid any lock-in, then Google Takeout is an honest and practical solution.
It's clearly not meant as a routine backup solution though.
For me, the "Back it up in a place you trust" is coming back to square 1 of the parent poster's problem. I actually do have my photos on (a few) disks and computers, not on Google, and I still have the problem that I want to hurl money somewhere and say, "use this money..."
I'm kinda hoping for some open-source solution to emerge based on IPFS or the like, which would let me easily control replication of my photos & vids over a few local disks (probably via some local NAS machine[s]), and some online paid pinning service.
There are apparently some efforts towards something like that in the IPFS community [1][2], but no clear winner yet I think, or at least especially no good UI/UX for this yet.
[1]: https://github.com/ipfs/faq/issues/47 https://github.com/ipfs/faq/issues/47
[2]: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-cluster/issues/157 https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-cluster/issues/157
edit: some random service/startup which I just googled up which apparently tries to fit into this area, linking here to hopefully match them with potentially interested users, and thus maybe help them reach critical mass: https://www.reddit.com/r/ipfs/comments/846e64/photo_backup_and_album_sharing_mobile_app_built/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ipfs/comments/846e64/photo_backup_a...
I always get some photos printed. Granted, you can't print the hundreds we take these days, but do you really need ALL?
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In real empirical practice, which happens more often: google locks a user out of their own data (a user who wasn't intentionally blatantly violating the
TOS), or a non-google-user loses their data to due some technical error or natural disaster?
Getting locked out of gmail is no joke. I have an old account that’s been forwarding to me for years, but when I recently changed my phone I lost my two factor.
Despite being able to supply google with the creation date (they ask), the fact that my name/birthday is the same on both accounts, I’ve attached the same visa to both google accounts, I’ve logged on to them from the same ips, and the fact that it’s forwarding everything to me, I still haven’t been able to get it unlocked.
I’m not sure I’ve really spoken to anything but an automated process either.
It’s entirely my fault for losing the two-factor restoration keys, but it’s been a little frightening to realize that you can’t just contact google and have them help you.
tl;dr: Need to contact someone at Google? File a copyright complaint.
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I was in the same situation, having the correct logon credentials for my account, but the system refused to believe it's me and asked for proof, but I forgot the security answer.
Ended up filing a bogus copyright complaint, knowing they can't handle that automatically.
I told them there was a copyright violation and proof was in my locked account (a picture of a seven-legged spider...).
They unlocked the account long enough for me to move my accounts elsewhere.
Fuck Google.
I developed such a service some time ago, but it's impossible to find any market for it. The non-technical people say "but I have it on Google already?!" and the technical people say "I just created a DO droplet and configured backup to Backblaze, easy and cheap!!".
I find both options to be not ideal, since I'd like a simple, secure and safe way of storing my pictures. But that's the way the market is.
> and the technical people say "I just created a DO droplet and configured backup to Backblaze, easy and cheap!!".
That's very much missing the point. The non-technical option is inside that post: Backblaze. Do that twice, the second time with crashplan or carbonite, and you can keep your files safe without any trouble.
The real problem is that it can only protect the files on your computer. If you have data that's fed directly to google, there's no simple software to get it back out to where it can be backed up.
What if you're a bit cheeky, mount eg your Drive storage on a VM via one of the various 3rd-party filesystem-mounting systems out there, then run $backup_client on the VM pointed at the Drive local mountpoint?
Plenty of uncomfortable chances for failure, but a few heaped handfuls of error reporting would probably be mitigation enough.
Getting the initial clone done might be a little fun, you might need to actually download the Drive folder structure to somewhere spacious so you don't run into transfer ratelimiting for the initial upload.
There's no silver bullet replacement for the Google ecosystem. However there are plenty of choices for many important services such as Email, file/ photo storage, contacts / calendars, etc. You just gotta take the plunge!
The problem is people wanting one company to handle all their needs. When that company goes evil, their entire digital life goes down the drain.
Email is the single most important thing, and I can't understand why people use Google for that in 2018.
> find a silver bullet solution
switch to apple
Yeah, sure, with the stories of Apple deleting songs from your local machine because they were deleted from your cloud account because DRM or whatever, and IIRC even deleting some random photos because some bug (but w.r.t. photos I'm not sure if I recall this correctly, or just spreading FUD here.) Or was this Amazon with Kindle and with ebooks? Apple was sure reported as deleting high quality mp3s from your disk because they have mp3s of the same songs in poorer quality as their deduplication reference files on their cloud.
As much as I like apple, handing over all your data to another big company and praying for their good will is not a solution.
are you trolling?
does the GDPR have anything to say about this?
Put it at Amazon Glacier. Cheap, replicated across multiple zones.
I use Glacier quite a lot for things like this. It is essentially free to store what most people reasonably consider "a shitload" of personal data. The cost is putting it into Glacier and then of course getting it out again. I'm not willing to bet AWS will still be around in twenty years, but it's a dirt cheap bet that won't cost me hardly anything if I lose that bet.
This has been bothering me too. My solution is NAS as a place to put all the data in, backuped to the cloud.
It is not that complicated. Just pay(monthly)for a storage Box at Hetzner(just an example provider i trust) or any other provider and your Data is still there in 30 years. - https://www.hetzner.com/storage-box?country=gb https://www.hetzner.com/storage-box?country=gb