📺 023: Quit Google

Watched
In this episode of Reclaim Today, Tim OWens speaks with Dr. Pete Rorabaugh about some of the steps and challenges associated with with extracting your data and habits from Google. On the one hand, Rorabaugh was left inspired by reading Edward Snowden’s Permanent Record, however as Google starts putting a ceiling on what you can actually do, it is becoming a practical problem. They discuss moving email to something like ProtonMail, messaging to Signal and storage to Nextcloud. One of the challenges I feel is faced with any swap is there is always compromises or sacrifices, this is something that came up in Alex Kretzschmar’s investigation of open source options to Google Photos:

Our perhaps unsatisfying conclusion to this seven-app showdown exposes an important truth: the photo management software world is too complex for a one- or two-person dev team to properly handle. Unless we see some of these app-makers start to pool their resources together, it could be a while before we get a truly excellent self-hosted option to pry many of us away from Google.

Personally, I am interested in exploring Nextcloud as a space to store my photos and probably should move my email. I am also interested in the idea of storing all the images associated with my blogs in one spot and referencing them from there. This is something Jim Groom has touched upon.

One response on “📺 023: Quit Google”

  1. Ernie Smith discusses the challenges associated with hosting your own cloud. He provides a summary of his findings.

    So, armed with the knowledge that Syncthing is awesome but didn’t cover every one of my bases, I went with a hybrid approach. Rather than attempting to embrace one solution for everything, I decided a mix of solutions was the way to go, each optimized for specific needs.

    NextCloud for standard document editing and office-style applications, which can be useful in cases when I’m not near my machine or I want to make a quick edit to a file on mobile. This sync runs on just one machine, my Xeon—the same Xeon that hosts the server on Docker—and only stores essentials like text files and images at this juncture. (Essentially, I took away NextCloud’s need to sync most of my files.)
    Syncthing for file sync across a variety of machines. This runs on every machine I rely on, including iOS and Android.
    Backblaze B2 for long-term cloud file storage, which I manually handle once a week through the command-line tool Rclone. (Info here; I could easily automate this.)

    @readtedium https://tedium.co/2022/02/16/self-hosting-dropbox-alternatives/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedpress.me&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+tedium

    This is an interesting piece in regards to discussions of quitting platforms such as Google and Spotify.

    Reply

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