Even Google Employees Are Trying to Escape

As regular Irreal readers know to their sorrow, one of my favorite hobby horses is the need to keep control of your data. Broadly that means keeping it in open formats and on computers that you manage. If you’re committing your only copy of valuable data to some cloud service, you’re acting recklessly and are likely to suffer the consequences.

Jack Wharton has an interesting post in which he discusses the need and means of migrating his data off Google. More precisely, he wants to create a backup for his Google data while still using Google services. Wharton is a Google employee who “trust[s] Google completely in their ability to correctly retain [his] data” but he worries about Google’s recent inclination to lock users’ accounts for suspected Bad Think™.

I see many articles discussing getting Google-free but Wharton’s explains in detail how to get your data from Google. It is, he says, the least you should do. The processes turn out to be manual and a bit finicky but doable. Wharton has two decades worth of email, photos, and other important papers stored with Google so he needs a lot of backup space. He solved that problem by building a storage server to hold it all. Again, he gives a fair amount of detail on this so if you have similar storage needs you should definitely take a look at his solution.

If your requirements are more modest or you’re operating on a limited budget, you can still buy an inexpensive, reasonably-sized portable hard drive for your backups. After that, all that’s required is a regular backup routine to make sure you always have up-to-date copies of your data under your direct control. I store various data on iCloud so that it’s available across all my devices even when I’m on the go but none of it is committed only to iCloud. I always have a local copy. If you follow a similar policy, it won’t matter (much) if some cloud provider goes away or decides not to do business with you anymore.

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