Agreed. In the mean time I keep my Google accounts backed up on a daily basis to try to limit the damage.
- Thunderbird opens at 4 AM on a cron job, closed at 5 AM (use nircmd on Windows to do a graceful shutdown), data files backed up Jottacloud at 5:15 AM. Thunderbird automatically syncs via IMAP.
- Google calendar via Powershell equivalent of wget/curl, also scheduled and backed up off site.
- Google Photos is currently impossible to backup automatically.
This article made me look into this again, there are in fact ways to backup Google Photos.
Rclone claims to be able to do it, will test later. There is also gphotos-sync.
For Google Drive you can use the official sync client or you can use something like Duplicati. Google Drive also backs up your Google Docs, although I'm not sure how useful the format they come in is. Need to check if LibreOffice can open them, certainly any scripts in Sheets won't work.
I don't think there is an automatic solution for Maps a
The problem is really not just the data though. The issue Google is also your identity provider.
Even if you are not using google authentication to log into other services, if you don't have your password you might not be able to recover those accounts at all if you lose your @gmail address.
Its one of the reason I bought my own domain even though I use Google for mail. At least I can point my MX back to my own mail server or someone other provider if Google ever decides to make gmail/domains go away or kicks me off. Backing up my mail and other data itself is really the least bad part of potentially getting frozen out of Google,
Time to declare Google a utility (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we have reached the point where Google should be regulated as a utility. A utility can just shut down your services at will.
Re: (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. In the mean time I keep my Google accounts backed up on a daily basis to try to limit the damage.
- Thunderbird opens at 4 AM on a cron job, closed at 5 AM (use nircmd on Windows to do a graceful shutdown), data files backed up Jottacloud at 5:15 AM. Thunderbird automatically syncs via IMAP.
- Google calendar via Powershell equivalent of wget/curl, also scheduled and backed up off site.
- Google Photos is currently impossible to backup automatically.
Re: (Score:3)
This article made me look into this again, there are in fact ways to backup Google Photos.
Rclone claims to be able to do it, will test later. There is also gphotos-sync.
For Google Drive you can use the official sync client or you can use something like Duplicati. Google Drive also backs up your Google Docs, although I'm not sure how useful the format they come in is. Need to check if LibreOffice can open them, certainly any scripts in Sheets won't work.
I don't think there is an automatic solution for Maps a
Re:Time to declare Google a utility (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is really not just the data though. The issue Google is also your identity provider.
Even if you are not using google authentication to log into other services, if you don't have your password you might not be able to recover those accounts at all if you lose your @gmail address.
Its one of the reason I bought my own domain even though I use Google for mail. At least I can point my MX back to my own mail server or someone other provider if Google ever decides to make gmail/domains go away or kicks me off. Backing up my mail and other data itself is really the least bad part of potentially getting frozen out of Google,