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Comment by shadowprofile77 | Hacker News Reader

One very good reason to regularly download backups of gmail inbox, and if possible simply stop using it eventually.

Yep after reading a very similar story a couple of years ago (Google account closed and no recourse given) I’ve migrated all of my important accounts and subscriptions away from gmail and into an email address associated to a domain that I own. Now Gmail and Outlook.com are only used for spammy stuff that I don’t care about

What's the point of Google Photos if I've to keep backup. They may choose to lock me out and I've lost all my memories.

Never rely on a single cloud service for your backup. Always backup to at least one independent place such as a local hard drive or another cloud provider.

This. I suggest iCloud, Dropbox, Lightroom, OneDrive, or Ever. I often take advantage of “free trials” to upload all my photos to these services periodically. Once your free trial expires you can’t upload more photos but they hold onto the existing ones indefinitely.

I also use a NAS device (cheap!) and a lifetime Plex account for my viewer. Only iOS “live” photos are inconvenient to back up anywhere but iCloud so I don’t take many Live Photos.

I have all of my photos in a RAID 1 at home, and I regularly "rclone" all of them to Backblaze B2. I have all of them inside Google Photos because that's how I view them, but I don't consider it to be a backup. It's just a much more convenient way to access the photos from many devices, and share them with friends and family.

Apart from that, I keep a Google Takeout archive the same way (RAID 1, B2)

Google Photos is not a backup system. It’s a place to host photos in the cloud. You need your own backup somewhere else.

Don't keep your photos in only one place if you care about them, even if that place is Google.

Google Photos is a handy worst-case backup for your photos, but it's not magic and you really need to keep another copy somewhere.

And be as independent of google services as possible.

I seem to remember a website that helped people "de-google" (something like that), where it listed self hosted alternatives, or other cloud services with better customer service track records.

This? https://framasoft.org/en/

is it https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/alternatives/ ? This is done by framasoft, a French association which is doing a nice job in promoting alternatives.

Probably https://nomoregoogle.com/ by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pieterhg

Any backup recommendations? Gmvault stopped working earlier this year, and for multi-gigabyte accounts via a connection that is prone to get interrupted every once in a while, I couldn't find anything that seemed as simple and robust (Gmvault allowed incremental backups, tolerated disconnections, ...).

Google Takeout.

I used to use offlineimap and as far as I know it should still work...

You scared me for a second until I checked my gmvault logs.

FYI, it still works.

It's true that I had to create my own google console project[1] to have my own tokens some months ago, but I think that's a very good move in any case.

[1] https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault/issues/335#issuecomment-4...

With all that GDPR stuff we have now shouldn't they actually be forced to let you download all your data in a simple way? I don't use GM for anything relevant but I'd totally abuse the "get my data" thing to backup stuff.

takeout.google.com

If you're using Mac, you could try https://thehorcrux.com/

Disclaimer: I'm the developer.

I'm surprised you managed to get the Copyright for 'Horcrux'. Did you have to licence it at all?

Hmm, I don't see "Do you have to destroy another email account in order to set it up?" on the FAQ list. I suppose, arguably, a user would be impelled to use the service by witnessing the destruction of an account near and dear to them, perhaps enough to split their soul...

I don't think there is any copyright on mere names of fictional objects (e.g. Palantir).

IANAL but with my 10 mins of googling I've found the following:

* Items/characters cannot be trademarked unless they are the source of goods or services (so therefore this service would have the right whereas JK. Rowling et al wouldn't) [1]

* Items/characters are copyrighted when featured in a copyrighted piece of fiction (which Horcruxes are). [1]

* JK Rowling et al are crazy litigious [2][3]

* JK seems to endorse/praise fan collections of stuff, but the team come down hard on people trying to sell that commercially. [2] That does, however, seem to be for publishing books eg. fan fact books.

[1] https://corporate.findlaw.com/intellectual-property/protecti...

[2] https://www.legallanguage.com/legal-articles/harry-potter-co...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_disputes_over_the_Harry_...

I was talking specifically about item names, not items / characters as a whole.

How is that different?

Shouldn't you make regular backups of your emails anyway, whichever alternative to GMail you use? And then what do you gain by switching in practical terms?

I do find these account suspensions terrifying. It's the biggest issue I have with using GMail, but I treat it like any very low probability event of shit happening to my data.

POP3 for the win!

(unlike IMAP, it only downloads things No way the server can tell the client to delete something)

> One very good reason to regularly download backups of gmail

And anything else you care about.

People were bad at backing up local data, but what they're worse at is backing up data that is in someone else's hands ("cloud").

Recently I was listening to a tech podcast (Tweakers, Dutch) and they discovered how dependent the presenters were on Spotify for their entire collection of playlists and library that they spent lots and lots of time gathering and curating. The reason I don't have this problem is because I already had this problem: Grooveshark happened to me. My music was all on there, including custom mp3s that I pulled from Youtube. So after spending some time importing all of that to Spotify from memory, I used the API calls to export my data from time to time. These days, people have it easy: just run a GDPR export from the Spotify website. (That reminds me, I should still email the guys at Tweakers.)

I guess I also grew up with data loss more than average. As someone who wrote code from ~12 years old, but who didn't understand the rest of their computer well enough to take proper care of it, the family computer guy had to reinstall it a bunch of times and I lost data every time for different reasons (he also didn't really give a damn). And I overwrote an external hard drive once when I thought that backup software would just put the backup there, not clone the disk. And 000webhost cancelled my account one summer. And a hard drive died, then (I actually had a backup!) the backup hard drive was accidentally destroyed by my little brother. In that summer, I lost all code, school documents, game save files, browsing history, chat history, nearly everything I ever did digitally. Taught me a thing or two...

Any good tools for automating this that are already out in the world?

gmvault

It stopped working earlier this year, due to OAuth API changes by Google, if I'm not mistaken. Or did you manage to get it working?

It still works for me

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