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Comment by setq | Hacker News Reader

First post, might as well be a cautionary tale. My father, a pretty old programmer by anyone's standards, regularly warns me of this sort of thing. He was pretty much shafted by CompuServe many years ago on a miniscule scale compared to what is possible now. He lives his life in what I previously described as a paranoid bubble of data control.

Until I inevitably burned myself with Google. I have no idea what happened but my account was terminated suddenly. No warning and no explanation as my backup address was no longer valid. This was two years ago. I lost documents, account details, contacts, calendars, email history, conversations between people on hangouts plus my phone decided to ask me to sign in again and became as useless as a dumbphone instantly.

Took about a month to reorganise my life and I lost contact with people, failed to complete tasks because my record was gone, lost control over my personal finances which were in Google sheets. Probably burned a week of my life on this as well.

Now using a cheap Nokia 106, POP3 box with gandi.net, mozilla Firefox and lightning, encrypted USB sticks for backup and LibreOffice. Never been happier.

I am genuinely afraid of going through this again. Everything remains portable between OS and provider now. Things are more volatile than we realise. I understand my father now.

I'm not against using all in services like Google but you need backups, an exit plan and a DR strategy explaining where all the services will go plus the time to carry it out. If you don't have these or it's too expensive to do this even for a personal user, don't even cross the starting line with the product.

Edit: Also beware of potential mergers, political whim and products being redacted or broken for long periods of time. All of these have affected me over the years.

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The way Google made us used to transform an email box as a storage and backup place is terrifying. Sending 2Mo attachments become a norm[1] and lots of people consider having their life stored there.

It just seem not sustainable. If you would do this with paper in the past, your place would just be full of junk. Our cloud life is an horrific stack of garbage. We just don't need most of the things we store, keeping everything as proof of evidences for a potential event that will surely never happen, as if we were all super important targets of an improbable crime scene.

I hate this ideology. Thinking about getting out of it is perfectly sane.

[1] Yes I know storage is cheap, but then forget about ecology and climate change control, I have no proof of this but can't believe that all the Google servers of the world don't have an impact, even if it seems quite clean

Good points there.

I tend to delete lots of things people might keep. I keep my inbox empty as well. Life is easier that way rather than deferring all the storage decisions later.

> [1] Yes I know storage is cheap, but then forget about ecology and climate change control, I have no proof of this but can't believe that all the Google servers of the world don't have an impact, even if it seems quite clean

This is ridiculous reasoning. The best (though imperfect) proxy for the climate impact of a given service is how much it costs. If Google is giving away the service for free, it can't be costing them a lot of energy to run (or alternatively it's producing a lot of value for them).

Also don't forget that We proxy pay google service with Ads. If you are paying something for free doesn't mean that there is no hidden costs.

Also, I am not sure to about drawing a correlation between cost and climate impact.

I don't have a good answer here, but I believe it may be instructive to consider externalities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality). For instance, think carefully about how they may apply here.

> transform an email box as a storage and backup place ... and lots of people consider having their life stored there.

That might be viable if Google had kept its promise about users never having to delete their emails. As it is, the total capacity (shared with Gdrive) is 15GB, which wouldn't be much of a life.

I was one of the first Gmail users outside Google and got to 14.99GB some time ago, just with email. And I delete loads of it.

But I don't worry too much about losing Gmail. First, all incoming email is forwarded to an Outlook.com mailbox (which never complains about lack of space). Second, I use my own domain name. As long as I never forget to renew that, I should be OK....

> keeping everything as proof of evidences for a potential event that will surely never happen, as if we were all super important targets of an improbable crime scene.

Great point, and I see a chilling effect in your file storages being used to determine your "character" should you be involved in a lawsuit of some kind.

As an innocuous example, perhaps due to my being a millennial, I save thousands of memes on my phone that I find funny and share them with friends on a daily basis.

I would be shocked to hear if myself, or someone I'm friends with, was deemed a "horrible person" by the courts because some Shutterstock images with overlaid text have some dark humor attached.

I'll repeat what I said in my prior comment on this thread: We need a massive class action lawsuit against these companies ASAP.

Google should not be allowed to cut someone off from all products without, at the very least, a reasonable period of time during which data is available in useful export formats, email still functions 100% so one can transition important accounts that use it, etc.

Consumers are getting hurt in a big way by these giants and nobody is doing a thing about it.

While I don't disagree, and I'm not sure if this applies specifically to Google in this case, but as a general trend oftentimes users sign their class action rights away in the EULA by way of an arbitration clause.[0] This, in and of itself, is also IMO a huge abuse of power. But it's perfectly legal and only serves to further entrench the power of the monopolists.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitration_clause

This clause will be null and void in most EU jurisdictions. So maybe from this side of the pond?

Agree and disagree.

Nobody reads these things. Ergo, nobody agrees to them.

Let's get it in front of a Jury. What do you want to bet that not one person in the Jury has ever read these incredibly one-sided, purposely obscure, usually incredibly long and complex agreements? Nobody. Not the Judge nor the Jury.

Not to get political, this is precisely one of those things that earned Democrats a defeat. Demeaning and diminishing others eventually has consequences. Being completely insensitive to the needs and plight of average folks. To hide behind EULAs crafted by the powerful, for the powerful and damn you little insignificant people is disgusting. To think so little about people and users that it is deemed OK to upend their lives instantly by a mindless, heartless algorithm.

This is the behavior of a mean vindictive totalitarian dictator, not of a business that purports to be guided by Democratic ideals and concepts such as "first do no evil". The hypocrisy is deep and wide.

Nah, a Jury would destroy them.

Getting in front a jury means surviving summary judgment. A good contract is designed to allow any disputes be resolved at the summary judgment stage.

It's been a while since I've looked at the enforceability of clickwrap class-action waivers, but it's either enforceable or not as a matter of law. No factual issues in dispute = no jury required.

I could very easily argue they are fraudulent. The technology has existed for years to ensure that people agree to such important matters as giving up all your rights. Of course they don't want to put that in front of people because they'd have massive push-back. Imagine an interactive EULA being presented to a user clause-by-clause with clear large print and a clause-by-clause agreement button.

I'd be surprised if these things could survive a well mounted legal challenge purely based on common sense. The intention of these companies is to take it all from the user and have exactly zero responsibility and exposure. Way too one-sided for companies that affect hundreds of millions of people, particularly if they claim not to do evil.

If public shaming won't do it maybe government intervention will.

https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault - backs up your gmail account to a local db, and lets you restore it to another account.

I'm a huge fan of GmVault. I backup all my email accounts with it to a home server that syncs my mailboxes over to Dropbox as well. Pretty painless to setup and very reassuring to know my mail is safe.

I have used GmVault before, but since now there's Google Takeout, doesn't that do everything GmVault does and more?

I can't speak to that. I've not looked at the output of Google Takeout. Also GmVault (for me at least) is 100% automated so I will at very worst lose 6hrs of email. Google Takeout is a manual process AFAIK.

Going on a tangent, there should probably be a set of universal backup formats that can be advertised as being somewhat portable. So that, if you need to can take your mail and other online business stuff elsewhere if need be. Beyond this article a user might start working for some place that does not allow external app use, but they can bring their data with, to be loaded onto the service. I guess like github and git. but with mail and calendar stuff.

my 2c.

Agree entirely. I considered forming a startup that did this after the fact.

Blatant violation of the First Sale doctrine. Class action lawsuit incoming in 3..2..

I think the legal theory behind this would be that you have agreed that Google can terminate your account for any reason.

Furthermore, they're not preventing you from reselling your phone at all - just deleting your account. Not "deleting your account if you do resell it" just deleting your account. First sale simply means they can't sue or get you arrested. They can do anything else with you, and refusing to do any further business with you certainly falls within that scope.

Without additional laws there's nothing to do here.

TLDR: never use your main Google, or Facebook, account for anything, not even buying a Google made phone, or buying Facebook ads for your own company, just never ever do that, so that at the very least, the pain is spread. They are businesses, and you do not want to give them a trivial way to retaliate or use this in a negotiation.

>never use your main Google, or Facebook, account for anything, not even buying a Google made phone, or buying Facebook ads for your own company, just never ever do that, so that at the very least, the pain is spread.

Be easy :) . I have 6 facebook accs for 5 of which I forgot passwords, 4 google accs out of which 3 got permalocked because sms confirmations simply never go through to half of Russian numbers, and I think 5 Paypal accounts all of which got blocked because "hey, you are the guy whom we blocked last year! you dared to register again? unforgivable!"

Yes, don't keep things online, you will be better off

>I think the legal theory behind this would be that you have agreed that Google can terminate your account for any reason. //

Just because they claim it doesn't mean it's legal nor moral.

We, as you intimate, probably need legislation to protect the data of users, requiring companies to take due care of it and requiring they provide access to users leaving a service, etc..

Moreover I think work needs to be done on enabling products, including software, when a seller/manufacturer withdraws support. Phones could be required to have systems that enable interoperability across service providers. Games could be required to publish servers and/or protocols allowing them to be used when companies EOL them.

Emain inbox portability would be amazing!

There's really nothing preventing you from jumping providers.

It's just that you have to be prepared before shit like this goes down.

With e-mail, as long as you have IMAP support you can relatively easily download all your mails and upload them to another server. Just takes a while if you aren't good at cleaning out old stuff. There even are companies offering that as a service if you don't have a fast internet connection, only a mobile device or ...

Or you can use imapsync; make sure you get the latest version from github as the version that ships with most Linux distros is really old. As it is written in Perl you can run it on Linux, Mac, and Windows. It handles one way sync in either direction and two-way sync. It copies all the flags and whether emails are marked read etc.

For Email with IMAP, you have the wonderful offlineimap tool[0], I have been using it for years, you can easily perform a maildir format[1] backups of all your email accounts.

[0]: http://www.offlineimap.org/

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir

Agree - Maildir is a pretty good format, because it's just RFC822 (5322 these days, but who's counting) files with weird filenames. mbox format isn't too bad either.

Calendar data you can mainly download as .ics files. Addressbook data is somewhat trickier, a directory full of VCARDs is probably the gold standard.

Yep, .vcf is pretty nice, also stores the contact image inside.

mbox format is horrible, because if the irreversible "From" quoting it requires. And as an "editable" format (e.g. If you want to delete an email in the middle of it), it is perhaps the least robust possible.

Maildir is ok. Mbox couldn't be retired early enough.

I have been taking a Thunderbird local dump of all my Google mail for years as a backup (Thunderbird's mbox format is readable everywhere) so I can clear my Google account regularly, yet have a backup.

No idea what I'll do when Thunderbird eventually goes away - what is the replacement with identical functionality on macOS? I only want to grab mail and append to my existing mbox files.

Hopefully it won't go away. It's transitioning to an independent support setup.

You can donate to the project, I just did so today in fact:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Donate

Thanks for the info.

Not sure if Postbox on the Mac will meet your needs or not but it's based on Thunderbird and done by a company founded by Thunderbird's lead engineer. It's a paid product, but well worth it...I use it as my main email app.

https://www.postbox-inc.com

Thanks for the link, I will take a look. Do you happen to know what its mailbox format is underneath? That's the main crux issue for me. It would have to be a format I could migrate easily like mbox.

eg. my Outlook PSTs and OSTs are useless to me as I have nothing that will open them.

offlineimap is pretty good. You can use the (very!) standard Maildir format, and eventually re-upload your emails elsewhere if you move.

We do have those formats. Mbox for mail, iCalendar for calendars, vCard for contacts. They're all IETF standards.

Google provide data export from nearly all of their services in standard formats. Where no established open standard exists, they provide clean HTML or JSON.

https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

Is there any good way to automate this monthly

There are several commercial solutions for G Suite backups including SpinBackup and Backupify.

https://spinbackup.com/products/google-apps-backup/ http://www.datto.com/backupify/google-apps-backup

I wouldn't actually call Mbox a standard. Thunderbird supports it, but I'd argue it sucks as a way to escape Gmail, because no competitor to Gmail supports it as an import method. In fact, even Gmail itself can't import from Mbox. It may be a standard in that it's defined somewhere officially, but it's not really a standard in the definition that it's commonly used.

As someone who has nearly completed their GExit, I'd say I found Takeout to be borderline useless as an export strategy.

There are several tools available to convert from Mbox to proprietary mailbox formats.

Couldn’t you import the Mbox archive in Thunderbird/Claws-Mail/something and then copy the mails to whatever cloud provider you wish to use?

And it's pretty easy. I have a few accounts on Thunderbird and I can drag and drop e-mail directly from one account to another, I think they are .eml files. You can also have local accounts just for storage.

On the one hand, there are many mbox variations and you may encounter some difficulty in getting your emails out of the Takeout mbox file.

On the other hand, please understand that there is no better option. Said differently: Google Takeout has made the BEST choice here. I giggled with delight when I saw they chose mbox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox

    [...] 1975 [...]

Legally, you're at the mercy of the provider to supply these. Most third-party applications that would provide effective backup solutions could be construed as illegal under the CFAA, as long as the ToS includes boilerplate forbidding automated or proxy access (and almost all do). Even without such a ToS, courts can and have held that merely visiting a page can constitute a copyright infringement based on the momentary copy stored in RAM being unauthorized, and specific notification that the company no longer wants you contacting their servers would also cause any future access to violate the CFAA, more or less regardless of the text of the ToS.

There was a company called Power Ventures. They made it easy to export your Facebook data. They never stored anything the user didn't have a copyright interest in (that is, they only stored the user's own data, like their profile pictures and status updates). Nevertheless, Facebook took them to court and shut them down. The company had trouble retaining a lawyer after the shutdown (and companies must be represented by a member of the bar -- pro se is not allowed) and ultimately, the founder was held personally liable for $3 million in damages.

That's what happens if you look like even a remote threat to a major technology incumbent.

We need to fix our tech access laws.

Yup, this is what i'm trying to avoid by backing up my life. The data storage mechanism is my hardest point.. I like Camlistore, but really i'd love something that is accessible from anywhere.

Eg, a distributed access system like IPFS, but for personal use only (closed network, as best possible) would be ideal. Including distributed though, it needs versioning like Camlistore.

Ultimately i'll just go with Camlistore and likely build tools around the access UX. It's the best i've found, without rewriting it myself (too much work for too little gain atm, imo)

I really like the idea of Camlistore. But I really want something my family could actually handle if the worst came to the worst and that just happens to be bitlocker encrypted NTFS. Plug the stick in, plonk in a password and you have all my things.

What would prevent Camlistore from the same model? I guess if you're gone, the server might not be running properly, and they wouldn't know how to start it and etc. Ya?

That's fair. I wonder if it would be worth it to write some type of camlistore extraction tool. Eg, plug in a USB, autoruns a script which mounts a blob store as a fuse FS.

Hell, the blob store could be packed with the USB.. a sort of way to backup Camlistore that your family can always access. I actually like that idea. Fuse may not be a good access model (it's tied to unix of course), but maybe just a couple binaries that will auto run and display the stored camlistore blobstore.

Sounds like a nifty project and nifty way to backup camlistore for family/non-tech oriented. No servers needed, no understanding of the tech you use. As fool-proof as you can make it.

Thoughts on this related to your model?

Some interesting ideas but I've got to ask:

What if the ABI breaks, the CPU architecture changes or the project gives up at some point in the future?

Ergo, I prefer to leave just the data. The data is hard enough on its own: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13367398

I mean, the data is still there, fwiw. I'm not sure how generic bitlocker is, but i imagine i have to have a tool specifically tailored to decrypt the bitlocker data.

With Camlistore it's one level extracted. You'd need a tool to decrypt and scoop up all the chunks for a given file - but you could write that in Bash. The Camlistores blob store doesn't do anything fancy (that i recall! i could be wrong), it's just a bunch of json documents with the file contents in them.

Though, Googling it now, it looks like BitLocker comes with Windows, so i can see why you like that. Your family doesn't need any tool, it's built into Windows. Not sure how that works with OSX though.

> What if the ABI breaks, the CPU architecture changes

Totally valid - but i could throw what ifs all day long. What if your family isn't on Windows? Here[1] is what i got for OSX (no idea if it's accurate).

Though this does raise a good point - while a binary is nice for dependency free solutions, having non-bin solutions might be nice too. Eg, a Pyhton solution included is likely to work on all operating systems. The user has to of course install Python, which is bad. A platform specific solution (bash or dos) might be handy too.

Binarys only would indeed be potentially bad, you are correct, thank you!

> or the project gives up at some point in the future?

Well in my proposal, the project is irrelevant. The exporter is already made. As long as the user can run one of the compiled binaries they could access/export it fully (in the concept, of course)

[1]: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/239714/open-bitlock...

Bitlocker is quite specific but tailored to where everything already is. None of my children or my wife are OSX fans. I can't find a better cross platform solution if I'm honest - if there was one I'd be there. TrueCrypt was used before I used bitlocker and we know where that ended. Bitlocker works on OSX pretty well with this: http://www.m3datarecovery.com/mac-bitlocker/

Will mull over your ideas; there are definitely things to be gained and there's always tradeoffs that need to be considered.

VeraCrypt and CipherShed picked up where TrueCrypt left off.

To be clear, i don't think my ideas are better - this is merely a discussion.

I do like Camlistore's approach to generic data storage though - ie, there is no organizing files/etc. Of course you can always go back and add metadata, but i treat it like a database dump - which is quite nice.

I think what i need is to find the simplest solution to export/expose the data within camlistore. Then i can encrypt like you are, and be sure that family can get data back out. Hmm, much to think on.

Appreciate the discussion :)

That is why I stick to OSS like Linux, Thunderbird, nextcloud, etc. as much as possible. I got locked into a closed source platform once and it was a pain to get out of it. I will never let it happen again.

And for email ?

The parent poster is correct and it's a good assertion. I'm doing the same thing, even though I'm using Windows as a base operating system, primarily for convenience at this point in time.

Email is very portable if you keep it in a place you control. You're pretty much just paying for a collection and caching service if you use POP3/IMAP and store your important folders locally. That is portable in a couple of hours between hundreds or thousands of different companies who operate standard protocols.

And then there's the possibility of running your own MX with postfix/dovecot etc if you really want.

I'm myself using a non-profit email redirection service as my main e-mail address. They do not provide an email box, just the redirect, so they can keep the service lean with a very modest one-time fee for new members.

This allows me to change the actual e-mail provider when needed. I already moved (successfully) away from Gmail, and I'm currently considering moving again as the spam protection of my current paid-for email service isn't that great.

I think the redirection service is ingenious. Sadly it isn't available worldwide, so I won't advertise it here, but I'm sure there are others like that.

How does it work for sending, though?

Sent via the email provider, but I'm using clients that can set a custom "From" and/or "Reply-To" header fields, containing of course the redirecting address.

Thanks for your answer. What about DKIM? Are you forgoing it, or do your clients have support for signing the emails?

As an anecdote, I've never used DKIM or even SPF and have no delivery problems from my domain.

To be frank I haven't even thought to consider DKIM, so I guess it's fair to say it hasn't been a problem. This is a private e-mail address with quite low number of outgoing e-mails, so hard to say how universal my experience on this is.

I have a DigitalOcean droplet running Postfix, which provides edge security and a private IP, but no storage. All my mail is routed through this droplet across a VPN to my home Exchange server. Exchange backups are encrypted and stored on Amazon Cloud Drive. Yes, there's a reliance on cloud services for backup storage, but the only time I'd need the offsite backup is if my home servers both became unavailable for some reason. I'm happy with taking the chance that, if that happens, it won't happen at the same time as Amazon closing my Cloud Drive account.

I admit though, this is probably over the top for most people. I do it because email is my job, so it's useful to have my own servers for testing stuff.

Self storage is fine but does it guaranty long term documents safety?

I am very sceptical about my ability of maintaining it on the long term.

I have a home server, which is then mirrored to a rented server. Anything critical and entirely irreplaceable goes onto blu-ray disks, because I can't accidentally delete those; though those are kept at home as well, which is not ideal.

So: 2 backups, from which one is off-site and archives, just in case - this should keep you going for a while with self storage.

>Anything critical and entirely irreplaceable goes onto blu-ray disks, because I can't accidentally delete those

There's bit-rot though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation#Decay_of_stor...

I'm aware of that too well; blu-ray, however, is slightly better than the predecessors: even the current, non-archival grade single layer Panasonics should - according to some accelerated tests - last 5-10 years. Now, looking at the current ideas from Sony[1], within 8-10 years every data I ever had will need 1 disk, so I'm not worried.

[1]: http://www.computerworld.com/article/3057889/data-storage/so...

Blu-ray? Really? Sure, they may last, but, will you have a blu-ray reader?

I've worked in IT for over ten years, and have not once, once seen a blu ray in person, or ever handled a machine capable of reading one. It'd be incredible afraid to have my backups in something that requires some expensive exotic device to be written/read.

You'd be much better off with USB sticks.

Check out M-Disc, most new drives, especially from LG, support burning them: http://www.mdisc.com/

They claim the discs should last 1,000 years. Obviously no-one has tested this.

This is usually a difficult problem. Then I divided everything I have data-wise into two buckets: stuff I can't afford to lose, stuff I can. It's now simple. Also I mandate that 'everything is a file'.

Turns out the former is only around 22Gb of mainly code, documents, videos and photos. The latter is 250Gb of music, films etc.

The latter goes on a NAS with a mirror on the laptop.

The important stuff lives on the laptop protected by bitlocker, an encrypted USB stick protected by bitlocker that is on me 24/7, the NAS and another offline unencrypted USB stick that I drop off at my parents' and cycle every six months. All disks are replaced every three years. All USB sticks once a year.

All file transfers are done with Beyond Compare by hand and verified after.

> It's now simple.

~> A handful of manual steps you need to remember to do.

The only offsite you have is at your parents, and is only "uploaded" every 6 months.

Isn't it just better and easier (at least long term) to just use duplicity (or equivalent) and sync your NAS to any backend (Drive/Onedrive/Dropbox/Hubic/etc)? And then just use your NAS as your "true" storage? Then it'll just run until your configuration changes (NAS switch, service discontinued, etc) at which point you reconfigure it once.

Yes that 6 months window I decided is ok for me. It might not be for you. If my house burns down, my car burns down and I end up in hospital, losing 6 months of data potentially isn't a major issue.

If you make it a conscious scheduled process you know it's working.

I'm a relative expert with duplicity (I run a whole pile of stuff in AWS that uses the S3 back end for backups) and it's not a solution I really entirely trust. First you incur the wrath of configuration i.e. the initial ramp up to get it working, then there's the monitoring overhead which isn't trivial as it isn't the quietest bit of software known to man, and finally we have the complexity perspective which introduces a lot more code, network transport etc.

Plus it is horribly buggy, particularly with incrementals, metadata and corruption. The same is true with Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox which I have used.

Edit: comedic timing perhaps, but since I wrote this post I've just got a duplicity failure to deal with...

This is why I went with CrashPlan. Backing stuff up to a friend's computer? Free and only limited by their storage.

or.. put a box at your friends house with as much storage as you want. Back when I had FIOS (and it was fast & reliable) this is what I did. Put a NUC with a friend, had an external drive, we were each others offsite backup location. Quite handy.

Every six months is a very painful potential loss window. There are great sync tools that can work point-to-point over the Internet. The cost of having a NAS at home and a NAS at your parents, and then syncing between them is totally worth it.

crashplan has a client that handles this, it's free for this sort of usage, you only pay if you use their cloud service.

Are you seriously less trusting of your own ability to drop a bunch of documents onto a USB drive every week or few than you are of a company which explicitly tells you they can shut off your access with no warning and no recourse for any reason?

...yes?

Because the likelyhood of Google banning your access is way lower than * Data corruption * House fires * Human error (Cleanup, house moves, random acts of brain farts, and suddenly you can't find your USB stick)

Google's data is presumably replicated across multiple AZs, and they have more automation invested in data integrity.

This is, I believe, the correct analysis.

I am personally/professionally qualified to keep my data extremely safe and distributed. It's one of the things I do at work, at scale. But it's not easy. It is, after all, work. I don't have to worry about that using Google and other online services.

And, in order to mitigate against the extremely unlikely event of Google going haywire and perma-deactiviating my account, I run takeouts twice a month. These large data dumps don't need to be heavily redundant, since it's exceedingly unlikely I'll need them at all.

Granted, going from a takeout backup back to 80% functionality would be a ton of work, but I'd lose very little, and I could indeed become functional again in relatively short order.

I wonder if people who decide to ditch most things Google/cloud for no other reason than concern about the risk of said cloud providers terminating their access have truly considered the risk/reward. Bad news, like specific cases of 'unjust/surprising' account termination percolates up to wide visibility quickly and easily, and stays with the people who read such things a long time. The hundreds of millions of accounts that have no such problems escape our attention.

I don't know the odds of my Google account getting terminated, but I'm pretty certain that it's in the same magnitude as the number of people winning the lottery per year.

Having said that, there are a lot of other good reasons to think about ditching cloud providers.

I've settled on having a NAS at home that backs up my most important stuff onto Amazon S3. I also have a lot of stuff with a paid dropbox account, that of course has local copies on my desktop and laptop. I'm looking into using Fastmail vs having my custom domain with an old grandfatherhed in google apps for your domain account.

thanks for posting this cautionary tale. I am completely dependent on Google today so if that happened i'd be F'd. Will look into exporting all my emails this weekend.

But why was Google unable to re-instate you? Was it because you had no way to prove your identity to them? Were you able to reach anyone?

for those in similar situation you can back up your email/calendar here: https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout/custom/gmail,cal...

Contacting Google support, unless you're an Apps customer which I wasn't, is a complete waste of time. Unless you can, to quote a colleague, piss through the eye of a needle, when it comes to the security questions and details then you can't even get over the first hurdle.

From any situation where your account has been disabled, I've seen a grand total of two positive resolution strategies:

- Get a lawyer and have them contact.

- Know a Googler personally.

Any product which relies on knowing someone at the company or a good lawyer should be marked instantly as suspect! :)

It would be great if someone put together a guide on how to migrate from a closed source systems (e.g. gmail, google drive, dropbox, etc) to open source systems. One with detailed, but easy to follow, instructions.

Ultimately information in the cloud, or anywhere is not backed up if it only exists in one place. Backing it up for one's self is essential.

This leaves most people in two categories: those who haven't (yet) had a catastrophic, unrecoverable data loss, and those who have. Leaving it to others, or all your eggs with just one service is an invitation to the first group. What I can say is it's almost certain something unimaginable will happen, be it a data center, service shutting down, or something getting corrupted.

I want to echo my experience of losing 16 years of email with Hotmail over at Microsoft due to the wind blowing arbitrarily in a different direction for a few months. I had my MSN messenger log in automatically to keep my account active on Hotmail, a criteria which was quietly ended. Unforgivable for me. Had some of it backed up luckily in real email clients but lost some critical emails and photos with a friend who passed away.

People who either haven't generated enough of a digital footprint and lost it are going to be in for an inevitable surprise with the online services that they take for granted as being ubiquitous. While the cloud is awesome, it is still quite in it's infancy.

> Now using a cheap Nokia 106, POP3 box with gandi.net

+1 for gandi.net - they are great.

Questions: how did you get lightning assuming you're talking about the browser for Android which does indeed not require Google integration, on a Nokia 106?

And is this link by Google not an easy enough of a solution for backing up your Google stuffs? https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en

I'm talking about Lightning as in the Mozilla calendar. I don't use a smartphone any more.

Google takeout isn't or at least wasn't comprehensive at the time. There are other lock in items. Also it takes time and effort moving it somewhere else still, isn't instantly useable etc unless you can read vCards and iCal feeds..

I want to do the same but I don't know of anything that has Google-Level replacement for Drive/Docs/Sheets/Calendar. I really want one thought.

If I can get Email, Document Storage (Docs, Spreadsheets, PowerPoints, Calendars) I'd move to a personal in-home solution ASAP. If it could integrate with Android via F-Droid apps I'd be even happier.

The lesson you should have learnt here is to keep backups. I'm amazed at how people store all their stuff on a single company's servers, and keep no backup at all (either locally, or at some other company).

That was the lesson learned. Also that you should store everything in easy to access formats.

Backups! Even in the cloud era you still need backups.

This is not just about backups; this is the reason why I keep my mail on my own domain. ( It could by my own domain on gmail; it's not, but that a slightly different story ) This way I can move it to another company, alter DNS, do whatever I want with it to fix an issue.

When you're relying on a company you cannot circumvent in a situation like this (xyz@gmail.com as primary address), you might end up not being able to use your primary account, which might effect your business.

EDIT: I'm not going to address the problems with the DNS system itself, which is similarly flawed - you are only leasing a domain, not owning it, and the company maintaining it has the power over it. In theory, this could have been addressed with .onion IDs, but those are impossible to remember and with namecoin's .bit, bit this is not supported by enough real life DNS systems, so there is no alternative to that (yet).

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