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> Not only did he lose emails, contact information for friends and former colleagues, and documentation of his son’s first years of life, his Google Fi account
by ugjka 4y ago
> Not only did he lose emails, contact information for friends and former colleagues, and documentation of his son’s first years of life, his Google Fi account shut down, meaning he had to get a new phone number with another carrier. Without access to his old phone number and email address, he couldn’t get the security codes he needed to sign in to other internet accounts, locking him out of much of his digital life.
> “The more eggs you have in one basket, the more likely the basket is to break,” he said.
I only have a google account to have access to Play store. Everything else, mail, calendar, photos and storage, has been moved off Google
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- SergeAx 4y agoMoved where? Not to iCloud, I hope? Self-hosting mail, calendar and media is too complex task for 99% of population. This is not a solution.
- ugjka 4y agoProton, Hetzner Nextcloud
- tremarley 4y agoDon't trust Hetzner. They will do the same.
- lrem 4y agoWho won't?
- SergeAx 4y agoThere's no Proton Photos, as far as I am informed. Surprisingly, there is a Proton Calendar. But does it syncs with Calendly or Zoom, for example? I don't think so. Currently more or less adequate solution in terms of integration is self-hosted Microsoft Exchange. I wonder how much does it cost (including Windows Server license).
- PaulKeeble 4y agoNowadays you can buy a NAS and plug it into your router and then click the install nextcloud option and you have it running, then you add the app on your phone. Its no where near as difficult to get these level of capability as it used to now that Docker is integrated in a user friendly way in a lot of NAS software.
- patleeman 4y agoI run a server at home and I’ve set up Nextcloud. I don’t trust it to be more reliable than a paid service. The thing about self hosted solutions is you’re completely on your own if something goes wrong. You need to make sure you’re backing things up, that you can restore your Nextcloud configuration if your sql database takes a dump or you fat finger and delete some config files (I’ve done both). Or if you have a power outage or lose internet connection and can’t access vital files, or even something simple like a bad software update causing issues. While a great option, one can’t simply spin up next cloud and then move everything over like you would a Saas solution as a typical layman.
- megous 4y agoIf something goes wrong with your google account (or other SaaS that would lose your data, or ban you without recourse), you are not even on your own, you're just trully fucked. It's poof gone and no local/internet tech geek will be able to help you. If something goes wrong with your at home nextcloud, you still have the data/hw, and you can either get help troubleshooting from someone who understands what they're doing, or you can try yourself (which will take more time). You're not on your own. And even if you are, you can just shelve it, and defer the recovery for later. But unless it figuratively crashed and literally burned, you're not fundamentally prevented from recovering your data.
- sreevisakh 4y agoIn addition, backing up the services isn't that costly these days. Backblaze provides massive storage space at cheap rates and integrates well with encrypted backup software like Duplicity, Borg or Restic. Recovery from failure is usually a breeze with these software.
- reactspa 4y agoSomeone needs to put together a single-click Docker-Compose-type solution that will work on any Digital-Ocean-type shared host.
- ISL 4y agoOne solution to many of these concerns is a periodic backup (via Takeout) of your Google account.
- hosteur 4y agoHow do you automate this for daily backups?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MarchKilroy89 4y agoAutomating daily Google Takeout requests is exactly the sort of behaviour that I fear would trigger an account ban at some indeterminate future date. There are just too many unknown unknowns for me with Google now. Their ecosystem is, and has been for a while, personally relegated to burner account status.
- ISL 4y agoI doubt that you can do this daily -- I don't think Takeout can work differentially. Monthly or annual downloads though, can be scheduled manually simply by putting a note on your calendar. If an account goes down, the thing you'll miss most may not be the recent things, but rather the many years of archives you might have in a Google account.
- anon291 4y agoDo you have any suggestions for open-source Android backup solutions that can back up everything? Because I'm having a hard time finding any.
- kornhole 4y agoI have Nextcloud running on a Raspberry PI along with a dozen other services on yunohost.org. Nextcloud automatically backs up my family's contacts, calendars, notes, tasks, photos, files, passwords, bookmarks, phone locations and more. If you want to backup the APK's check out Seedvault. I am personally fine manually reinstalling APK's if/when needed so have not tried Seedvault yet.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoI moved that off too. Aurora Store in anonymous mode works great and also shows privacy info of each app
- sreevisakh 4y agoThe biggest problem with Play store is that many apps are geographically restricted. That includes banking and public transport apps. Some apps are restricted without even the knowledge of the developer. Most of those apps have no good reason at all to be restricted like that. Such apps often cannot be accessed through Aurora. Sadly, there are no laws or provisions to challenge such unethical tactics. Using Google's services is like living with a manipulative and abusive partner.
- nguyenkien 4y agoActually I use aurora to by pass geo fence like this all the time. You need search it int web browser and open in aurora, voila, you can install it
- sreevisakh 4y agoInteresting! I will try out that tip. Thank you!
- 88840-8855 4y agoSame here. Those shitty providers are a too high risk. Many years ago Microsoft has banned my outlook account for no reason. I tried contacting the support to resolve the issue - nothing. Only after writing a letter, I received the answer from Microsoft Germany: We banned your account because I was distributing porn through onedrive (which I was not doing). The investigation showed that Microsoft could not find any wrongdoing. The account was gone nevertheless. This is why I say: - skip Gmail/Outlook and all this crap, use something proper like mailbox.org with your own domain - dont trust cloud. Backup once a month, use two clouds at the same time, have a cold storage with your backups - biggest risk is your apple icloud account. dont be dependant on them: dont use their credit card - dont use google/ms 2fa apps - have multiple accounts in parallel: one for google drive, one for search, one for mail (if you need it), one for youtube, etc
- username223 4y ago> The more eggs you have in one basket, the more likely the basket is to break This. Use Yahoo for your email, Verizon for your phone number, Dropbox for your backups, Facebook for your socials… It doesn’t matter which you choose, but fragment your digital life. When one part goes bad, it won’t infect the others.
- sreevisakh 4y agoHonesty, I wish self hosting was easy enough for ordinary people to do. Then there would be no reason to recommend people to fragment their digital life among dozens of ad-funded SaaS platforms. There is no reason why it has to be so hard. But not enough effort has gone into developing such systems due to obvious reasons. Sandstorm project, for example pioneered a model where users could deploy web apps like they would install mobile apps on their phone. Sadly, it didn't achieve the level of popularity it needed.
- MikePlacid 4y ago> Honesty, I wish self hosting was easy enough for ordinary people to do. Synology Diskstations are rather easy to setup and not very expensive.
- sreevisakh 4y agoThank you for the pointer! Definitely something worth looking deeper into. However, I was talking more about the software side of things - so that we won't be locked into a hardware platform. That said, they do have an idea in the right direction.
- noisy_boy 4y agoI'm still totally not off Google yet but this is the direction I'm going in. Fastmail for email (still need to do the POP/IMAP setup for local caching using Thunderbird), local ISP for phone number, Syncthing for syncing across PCs/Android phones (except iOS which lives in its own world) and Facebook has been deleted long ago. Just takes a while to get off Google because of years of sign-ups but I already got the financial and government services off it.
- bpodgursky 4y agoIsn't the ability to migrate phone numbers a legal requirement for carriers? Edit: yeah it is [1] > Phone companies are required by law to port your number out when you start service with a new carrier. According to the FCC, a company can't refuse to port your number even if you have an outstanding balance or unpaid termination fees. [1] https://telzio.com/blog/what-to-do-when-a-carrier-refuses-to-port-your-number https://telzio.com/blog/what-to-do-when-a-carrier-refuses-to...
- tzs 4y agoWhen porting to a new carrier, the new carrier asks for your account information and PIN for the old carrier. The new carrier provides that to the old carrier to prove that the port request came from you. It looks like with Google you are supposed use the Google Fi app or website to obtain a “port out number” and PIN [1] to give the new carrier when they ask for account number and PIN. If you accounts have been banned I wonder if you can still get that information? [1] https://support.google.com/fi/answer/10888419?hl=en https://support.google.com/fi/answer/10888419?hl=en
- TylerGlaiel 4y agoHaven't had to do this with google (yet) but filing a complaint with the FCC usually gets you a very prompt response from the company the complaint is about, and I imagine this would be the best thing to do in this case https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us
- yeputons 4y agoYes, people have successfully sent FCC complaints to restore their Google Voice accounts (and Google Accounts as a consequence): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31070914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31070914 As it looks from LinkedIn comments, they still do.
- coffeefirst 4y agoI agree and have completely extracted myself from their ecosystem, but this isn't a reasonable expectation to push on the general public.
- silexia 4y agoWhen I started using Google, their motto was still "Don't be evil." My entire business and personal life runs on it, so I have no way to switch. 300 employees emails, all documents, videos, tons of custom scripts would have to change over.
- jrmg 4y agoThis is why I’m something of a two factor authentication Luddite. I (think) I understand the benefits - but the fact that every factor is an additional single point of failure freaks me out.
- userbinator 4y agoTOTP keys, backed up physically (as in, written down and stored somewhere safe), are probably a good way to balance the failure mode with the security.
- jrmg 4y agoMany (most?) things demanding my phone number as a ‘second factor’ don’t give that option, unfortunately.
- koheripbal 4y agoYou have to backup to 2FA keys. That's a must.