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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

For some reason I found this article hilarious.

  - Google ends unlimited Google Photos storage for new photos
  - User is apoplectic that hitting free storage limit may affect email
  - $2/month is an affront to user's anti-subscription sensibilities
  - User migrates photos off of Google Photos
  - User realizes 90%+ of his photos were a waste of space

It may very well be because I'm seeing myself in this. I just migrated a lifetime of email from Google Workspace to iCloud Mail when Google threatened my free legacy plan. It worked great, but I'm sure 95%+ of those emails are a waste of space.

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I'm sure 95%+ of those emails are a waste of space.

That's a bit like the old proverb 'Half of all advertising money is wasted'. Now, if only we knew WHICH half it was.

It's always surprising to me how often I try to search though years of emails looking for some particular snippet of information.

Just yesterday I needed to know what model of TV I owned, and rather than try to crawl behind it with a flashlight I searched for the BestBuy order confirmation in my email from years ago. I do that kinda thing all the time.

About ten years ago I deleted the 10 gig of email I had floating around. I delete everything now. Haven’t needed any of it yet.

If I do need to keep something I print it to a pdf and file that in documents and that’s about 20 emails so far.

User migrates photos off of Google Photos == user spends $60 on external hard drive + x hours of their time moving everything across. Seems a shit setup compared to forking over a pretty small amount of money to google for a very convenient service (especially when the hard drive dies and you realise the backups are out of date).

The problem is that things like photo storage and emails are really non negotiable. Most people need these things as a basic digital necessity. Google is well aware of it, and it knows that it can increase fees or reduce storage space in the future, and most of the folks will keep sticking around because the company holds a lifetime of emails and photos as hostages. It's just like the pusher who increases their rates for cocaïne, well aware that people who are hooked onto it will keep paying whatever.

I've spent quite some money and time to set up my own cloud, but the initial investment paid itself back after 2 years already when compared to the monthly cost of Google One. Companies like Google need to understand that, if they try to pull too much the rope of profit, even if that means hurting services that people have started to take for granted and built their lives around, then people will just start leaving.

Everybody is different, but my privacy and desire to not use my life as a feed for google AI & ML makes this a very small price to pay to move away.

Couple this with migrating to something self hosted like nextcloud, and I cant see why anyone would possibly pay google $2 per month to be part of their data aggregating empire.

I'm almost positive my home server (which is a lower end, but newer desktop) costs more than $2 a month.

I don't think Nextcloud's photos app would run well on something like a Raspberry Pi either, considering when I tried my photo collection in it, it would consume enough RAM to crash the 8GB VM it was in and give up.

While I have time and knowledge to troubleshoot, realize most don't and $2 is less than an XL coffee.

It is completely subjective and relies heavily on how much you value your privacy.

For me, the cost of running a home server is far less than the cost of Google having my entire digital footprint.

I really want a hybrid solution. Where my files are in both the Cloud and my Local NAS. I can cut off my subscription whenever I want, and I can change and sort the files on my Server at much faster speed. I also get the extra protection of offsite backup and redundancy check for files corruption.

> I really want a hybrid solution. Where my files are in both the Cloud and my Local NAS.

IPFS?

The alternative is to pay Google a fee each month forever. And when they decide to raise the fee, give them more money. And go along with any current and future privacy policy. As opposed to spending x fewer hours scrolling Facebook.

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