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This is why I run a personal Google Workspace account which has regular (hourly) backups managed by a self-hosted CubeBackup instance. It's quite a nice system: I get daily email summaries from CubeBackup via email, and I'm able to back up all the Google Drive/Email/Contacts/etc. data to both my local Synology NAS and Backblaze B2.

I have absolutely no affiliation with CubeBackup, but I highly recommend it (and a personal Google Workspace account) for anyone who uses the Google app suite. It costs me $5/yr and is worth every penny.

https://www.cubebackup.com/

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> I highly recommend it (and a personal Google Workspace account)

I can't recommend against this enough, and I work at Google. Workspace accounts don't work with so many services. At least YouTube TV, Nest cameras, Google Home sharing, Google Play family accounts, Android parental controls, and Opinion Rewards are broken in my experience, probably a lot more.

It's a shame, especially for people who've had a Workspace account for many years, and have a bunch of email, documents, and media tied up in it.

I wish Google would let us convert a personal Workspace account to a regular Gmail account.

I do to. Importantly, they need to let you merge a workspace account into the existing Gmail account you had to set up to use some services.

The cause of this is that Workspace accounts have a different ToS so they cannot simply convert one user type to another.

I don't see why not, if you're agreeing to both ToS and to the conditions of the migration. Most people who have these problems are either the maintainer of the Workspace domain or family members. It wouldn't be a problem to get additional sign offs.

I know a little more about the situation, but can't really comment on it here.

It works great for me. I recommend it. I’m not sure what working at Google has to do with recommending or not.

I don’t use any of the non-core services because I expect them to be killed off soon anyway. For contacts, email, docs, and drive it works great. YouTube as well.

I have a “regular” Gmail account in case I need to use any niche services that don’t work with my Workspace account.

Overall the trade off is well worth it.

I use YouTube TV with mine and that works fine, but I do agree with the general sentiment. Many, many things are unsupported or broken.

Right up until you want to share that YouTubeTV subscription with a family member via their "Family Sharing" feature. This is not supported and their support directs you to cancel your subscription and establish a new one using a regular gmail account.

With cost of storage pretty low and AI being so good, I wonder if having a home based thing for everyday use, especially photos (Sort, tag, Memory creation, junk detection etc.) will become easy enough that cloud usage declines.

There are still tech hurdles yes, but NAS + a decent GPU for photos, email organization, assistant is going to be a killer business.

I use Synology which has its own Photos app. Honestly, it’s there right now. I prefer doing my own tagging but it’s able to automatically group things just fine.

I got a second Synology for Hyperbackup and send one to the other for backups. Seems to work well.

Thanks for the recommendation! I'll check it out, curious on maintenance cost though as I don't really want a project.

1 - How much time was setup? 2 - How many times did it break in the last year? 3 - How many of the summaries were actionable?

My main concern with active auto backup is maintenance time; my expectation is I'm busy and my personal backup would take me weeks to fix if and only if I notice there is an issue, and the summaries are alert fatigue.

I feel while this situation is avoidable, you will still lose data from your last successful backup and anything less than "just works" isn't viable for anything important vs manual duplication.

I have two copies of some files (local and Drive) and probably a few Drive-only despite having local sync. If my computer died in the same time as Google list the data, I would expect some data loss, but the cost of categorical prevention is very high.

That being said, if it is only $5 and is actually touchless,

Setup was about 15 minutes getting the Docker image to run on my VPS, and it’s broken zero times in two years. The summaries are very basic and just let you know how much was backed up and if there were any errors.

Have you tried a restore?

I was going to say, if Google is silently losing and corrupting files then backing up from there is just duplicating the failure. But perhaps his backup scheme accounts for this unreliability.

That's why I'm wondering if they've tried. It may well be that the restore shows that even accounts that don't appear to be affected have lost files simply because very few people have an exact accounting of what it is that they've stored.

I have pretty much all of my stuff in a subversion repo and it serves both as backup and local copy checked out on multiple machines. The only exception is the business stuff (because it is shared with multiple people) and we use Google for that. But an inspection of Google take-out showed that it's nice to have the files but you won't be doing much with them outside of Google unless you download them one-by-one in a format that isn't tied to the Google cloud. And that is very tricky and time consuming.

Yes, probably once every 2-3 months. There’s a great interface for restoring specific files.

I keep the version history to infinite, so even if files are corrupted or lost on newer backups I can always reference the old ones, back to day 0. Backblaze is great for this as the storage price is negligible.

I think it works in a similar way to Tarsnap or something like Duplicati, but it’s a lot easier to manage and plugs in nicely to all of the Workspace account (not just Drive).

Thank you, that is great to hear.

Synology NAS can already do this without any third-party products via the ActiveBackup application. Supports Google Workspace and MS 365. It’s free, assuming you already own the Synology NAS. It replicates data from Mail, Contacts, Calendar and Drive within seconds or minutes, keeps a history of all changes and offers a nice timeline view to show and export data at any point in time.

CubeBackup is a nice alternative for me as it runs on a VPS. I’m often away from home for long periods due to business travel, and I like being able to remotely keep the backups working even if the NAS goes down or is turned off.

I do the same thing for Drive, but with rclone (which is free as in speech and beer). rclone makes it trivial to keep a mirror on backblaze and locally, which has come in quite handy a few times.

I've elevated to rclone fanboy since I discovered crypt: https://rclone.org/crypt/

Wow, Crypt is awesome.

I’ve never looked into rclone although I’ve heard much about it. Looks very cool. I didn’t know it supported Google Drive.

One nice thing about CubeBackup is that it handles all of the Workspace account, not just the Drive file storage, but also the contacts, emails, etc. all of which is equally important to me.

For Google Drive files, you don't need a special account or service to back up to Synology and B2, which I also do. I use the Synology Cloud Sync service to automatically sync all Google Drive files to the synology, then another Cloud Sync task to backup the Synology to B2. Works great.

Synology is indeed great, but CubeBackup is a nice alternative for me as it runs on a VPS. I’m often away from home for long periods due to business travel, and I like being able to remotely keep the backups working even if the NAS goes down or is turned off.

$5/yr + hosting, which is way more than $5 unless you have a terabyte going unused in a box somewhere

Yes I host on a very cheap Hetzner VPS (which I use for other self-hosted Docker images as well) so it’s always up. The storage location is not on the VPS itself, it’s S3 and B2 compatible, so you can use AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, whatever.

I use Backblaze which is quite cheap and reliable: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037814594-B2....

I assume that "self-hosted" meant precisely that they own the box. A hard drive is under $10/terabyte.

I was about to ask where you're seeing such cheap hard drives, but then I checked diskprices.com and saw that yes, there are indeed some drives for <$10/TB (current lowest price is $8.332/TB, and there are only 10 drives that are <$10/TB; I'm only looking at new drives).

I mean, I think my point is still valid for a $20/TB drive. It's a one-time cost, not monthly, and you're unlikely to exceed 1TB with Google Drive data.

Ah I assumed it was self-hosted but in the cloud somewhere

Self hosted means not in the cloud.

Google storage for a personal account is 15gb if I'm not mistaked, why would you need 1tb?

Is there something similar for Google Accounts (not Google Workspace)? I do it manually: I have the every 3 months automatic backup and I upload it manually to S3, but I'd totally pay for a service that does this automatically providing my S3 keys (or similar).

i have a synology NAS. It backs up my google account. For google photos it doesn't work.

So I pay for dropbox. The dropbox app backs up the photos and the synology fetches them from dropbox.

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