This petrifies me. Google provides an incredibly easy way for me to capture all data that I care about. Getting photos and videos of my kids growing up and keeping them for years is trivial with Google.

And in one little error it can all disappear with no recourse.

I continue to struggle today to find a silver bullet solution for someone like me who just wants to hurl money somewhere and say, "use this money to guarantee that my cherished photos and videos will be here in 30 years"

Second to that is getting locked out of my Gmail. I'd consider that more irritating than losing my wallet.

It's called Google Takeout[1]. Use it. Download all of your data. Back it up in a place you trust.

[1] http://takeout.google.com

For me, the "Back it up in a place you trust" is coming back to square 1 of the parent poster's problem. I actually do have my photos on (a few) disks and computers, not on Google, and I still have the problem that I want to hurl money somewhere and say, "use this money..."

I'm kinda hoping for some open-source solution to emerge based on IPFS or the like, which would let me easily control replication of my photos & vids over a few local disks (probably via some local NAS machine[s]), and some online paid pinning service.

There are apparently some efforts towards something like that in the IPFS community [1][2], but no clear winner yet I think, or at least especially no good UI/UX for this yet.

[1]: https://github.com/ipfs/faq/issues/47

[2]: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-cluster/issues/157

edit: some random service/startup which I just googled up which apparently tries to fit into this area, linking here to hopefully match them with potentially interested users, and thus maybe help them reach critical mass: https://www.reddit.com/r/ipfs/comments/846e64/photo_backup_a...

Yes, that is the problem I'm trying to articulate. Of course you ask a ton of engineers and you get engineering solutions. =)

What I want is a holistic solution. "I have money and I have data that I want taken care of. I don't want to do much work and I don't want to think about it more than once a year or two."

Takeout is great, but it has one major flaw. There is no way to download only data that has changed after a specified date, i.e no incremental backups.

There is also no "Take in". Your data might be all in that file, but without a lot of effort, you aren't going to be able to get it back into a usable form, with Google apps or a competitor.

It's not so bad actually.

The Google Drive files are exported as you would expect and you can just copy them into some other sync folder as is. Takeout transforms any Google Docs and Sheets into Word and Excel formats (configurable), so you don't end up with links into your disabled Google account (contrary to how their Backup and Sync client works).

Emails are exported as mbox files, calendars in ics format. It's pretty easy to import everything using widely available email and calendar clients. It's also pretty easy to put it all back into another Google account, but you're right, it's not as simple as importing the entire takeout zip file in one piece.

What I haven't tried is what happens to files that were shared with you. I would expect that they don't get exported because it's someone else's data after all.

I think if the purpose is to let you move all your data to a different provider and avoid any lock-in, then Google Takeout is an honest and practical solution.

It's clearly not meant as a routine backup solution though.

Getting locked out of gmail is no joke. I have an old account that’s been forwarding to me for years, but when I recently changed my phone I lost my two factor.

Despite being able to supply google with the creation date (they ask), the fact that my name/birthday is the same on both accounts, I’ve attached the same visa to both google accounts, I’ve logged on to them from the same ips, and the fact that it’s forwarding everything to me, I still haven’t been able to get it unlocked.

I’m not sure I’ve really spoken to anything but an automated process either.

It’s entirely my fault for losing the two-factor restoration keys, but it’s been a little frightening to realize that you can’t just contact google and have them help you.

tl;dr: Need to contact someone at Google? File a copyright complaint.

--------------

I was in the same situation, having the correct logon credentials for my account, but the system refused to believe it's me and asked for proof, but I forgot the security answer.

Ended up filing a bogus copyright complaint, knowing they can't handle that automatically.

I told them there was a copyright violation and proof was in my locked account (a picture of a seven-legged spider...).

They unlocked the account long enough for me to move my accounts elsewhere.

Fuck Google.

Top stuff. Impressed.

I developed such a service some time ago, but it's impossible to find any market for it. The non-technical people say "but I have it on Google already?!" and the technical people say "I just created a DO droplet and configured backup to Backblaze, easy and cheap!!".

I find both options to be not ideal, since I'd like a simple, secure and safe way of storing my pictures. But that's the way the market is.

> and the technical people say "I just created a DO droplet and configured backup to Backblaze, easy and cheap!!".

That's very much missing the point. The non-technical option is inside that post: Backblaze. Do that twice, the second time with crashplan or carbonite, and you can keep your files safe without any trouble.

The real problem is that it can only protect the files on your computer. If you have data that's fed directly to google, there's no simple software to get it back out to where it can be backed up.

What if you're a bit cheeky, mount eg your Drive storage on a VM via one of the various 3rd-party filesystem-mounting systems out there, then run $backup_client on the VM pointed at the Drive local mountpoint?

Plenty of uncomfortable chances for failure, but a few heaped handfuls of error reporting would probably be mitigation enough.

Getting the initial clone done might be a little fun, you might need to actually download the Drive folder structure to somewhere spacious so you don't run into transfer ratelimiting for the initial upload.

Wasn't there are story a while ago mentioning: https://one.google.com/ It'll be interesting to see what this support can do..

Anyways, print recovery keys for your account, use 2FA with yubikey or other U2F provider.

It is not that complicated. Just pay(monthly)for a storage Box at Hetzner(just an example provider i trust) or any other provider and your Data is still there in 30 years. - https://www.hetzner.com/storage-box?country=gb

In real empirical practice, which happens more often: google locks a user out of their own data (a user who wasn't intentionally blatantly violating the TOS), or a non-google-user loses their data to due some technical error or natural disaster?

That's what I do with Google Drive?

If I were to get banned from Google, I'd still have my folder as a backup which I can then upload to Dropbox or whatever alternative.

If I were to lose my folder (My hard drive went bust!) my folder is one resync away.

What is the problem you have with photos, and videos in that sense?

Or are you talking about the Free "Google Photo" thing for lower resolution images?

Careful with Google Docs & Sheets though. The Google Docs files you see in your local folder are only links, no content.

Google Drive doesn't back up email and calendar your private machine.

You're looking for LTO and a vaulting service.

http://www.ironmountain.com/digital-transformation/iron-clou...

What's the old saying, "If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it".

There's no silver bullet replacement for the Google ecosystem. However there are plenty of choices for many important services such as Email, file/ photo storage, contacts / calendars, etc. You just gotta take the plunge!

The problem is people wanting one company to handle all their needs. When that company goes evil, their entire digital life goes down the drain.

Email is the single most important thing, and I can't understand why people use Google for that in 2018.

There isn't exactly a plug-and-play, self hosted version out there advertising itself.

I mean, at least they aren't encrypting your data so you must use their services to view it, like what's happening in the paid music industry.

I always get some photos printed. Granted, you can't print the hundreds we take these days, but do you really need ALL?

If you don't keep them all, then you have to choose. Choosing takes time and effort that many people would prefer to spend in other ways.

Very few people think that every single shot will be meaningful in 30 years. But it's hard to know what will be and won't be.

This has been bothering me too. My solution is NAS as a place to put all the data in, backuped to the cloud.

Put it at Amazon Glacier. Cheap, replicated across multiple zones.

I use Glacier quite a lot for things like this. It is essentially free to store what most people reasonably consider "a shitload" of personal data. The cost is putting it into Glacier and then of course getting it out again. I'm not willing to bet AWS will still be around in twenty years, but it's a dirt cheap bet that won't cost me hardly anything if I lose that bet.

Bonus points when Digital Ocean nukes your account with no recourse, because that's happened to people in the past.

So, follow the backup instructions very very very carefully people!

Less likely that Google and DO will both lock your account at the same time.

> find a silver bullet solution

switch to apple

Yeah, sure, with the stories of Apple deleting songs from your local machine because they were deleted from your cloud account because DRM or whatever, and IIRC even deleting some random photos because some bug (but w.r.t. photos I'm not sure if I recall this correctly, or just spreading FUD here.) Or was this Amazon with Kindle and with ebooks? Apple was sure reported as deleting high quality mp3s from your disk because they have mp3s of the same songs in poorer quality as their deduplication reference files on their cloud.

As much as I like apple, handing over all your data to another big company and praying for their good will is not a solution.

are you trolling?

does the GDPR have anything to say about this?

> As a current user of gmail this worries me.

Anyone using a free service anywhere provided by anyone should be worried.

I pay to use gmail and their service is incredible. Whether it's been support chat, phone calls, etc... I've always received very prompt support from Google.

I’ve paid to use Google services before, and had the most miserable customer service experience with a company ever. Contact information difficult to find, and walled behind accounts you have no knowledge of potentially, and policies designed to be explicitly hostile (I had them admit that outright to me) - I ended up out of $500+ as a result, for which they only were willing to refund $20.

Google seems to just be an exceptionally bad actor - I’ve been starting to move away from dependence on them as a result, as they’ve proven to me that I cannot rely on them to be honest/transparent in the most important ways.

It isn't free if you have your own domain. In fact they prorate it when you cancel.

Yeah, I got mine for free too since I've had my domain for a while, but I have a newer domain that I set up on GSuite, and was paying $5/mo for, until I realized I could set it up as a domain alias of my original domain and get it for free.

> Google is impossible to talk to

Talking costs money, a lot of money, far more than computers.

It seems that Google One will have paid support, so your problem is solved!

If you’re locked out of the account that paid for support, how do you prove your eligibility for support to get back into it?

No idea, the product wasn't launched yet, but that seems like the most obvious use case to address.

> As a current user of gmail this worries me.

Have you looked at moving off gmail?

Not much yet tbh, but it's on the list.