Even Google employees don’t want to rely on Google

Jake Wharton (an employee at Google) shares his process of removing Google as a single point of failure for his data, in two parts.

Update: Jake Wharton is a former Google employee.

In part one he writes:

Now I trust Google completely in their ability to correctly retain my data. But I think it’s clear that over the last 5 years the company has lost something intrinsically important in the way it operates. I no longer trust them not to permanently lock me out of my account. And I say this as a current Google employee.

Followed by a description of how he automates the backup of his data.

In part two he details how he moved from Gmail to Fastmail. I used this service as well, before switching to a self-hosted Mailcow and then the hosted Mailcow service.

It’s not uncommon for me to read on Hacker News how people have been locked out of their Google accounts, losing access to all their personal files, photos and emails. But maybe such reports are good warnings. It’s almost never good to rely on a single service. For emails I use the hosted Mailcow with a number of my own custom domains (I’ve been using custom domains for many years), for photos and files I use a Storage Share from Hetzner (it’s basically a hosted Nextcloud) with a backup to an old Synology Disk Station that sits at my house. This allows me to easily migrate both my emails and my files to another service.

https://jakewharton.com/removing-google-as-a-single-point-of-failure-gmail/

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