One thing I've learned: Never (ever) make yourself reliant/dependent on Google products. If you do get banned / locked out, it is the most AI-Kafkaesque process imaginable to regain access. And you could stay locked out for years.
I use Google sheets myself from time to time, but I regularly do backups of the sheets I'm working on, or anything important I have access to. I've been in the hole before, for reasons I still do not understand, and it was one of the most frustrating "customer support" processes I've ever experienced, and it took years.
I keep telling people to make backups of "cloud" services ever since Grooveshark died from one day to the next
Maybe Spotify won't be taken down overnight, but they can lock me out for various reasons such as misdetecting an IP address (Google wouldn't let me log in at all when they thought I was in Russia, when I was at 31C3 in Hamburg, Germany, a conference where they afaik use some temporary IP space — I don't know what consequences that would have nowadays)
Hacker News also: if there are things here you want to keep, store them yourself
Facebook chats, Signal, etc.: download the data in a format you can decode if there's anything you want to keep. Make sure you can decode this Signal backup format if your phone dies
> I keep telling people to make backups of "cloud" services
The usual rule when making backups is that you need 3 copies, one of them offsite. A cloud storage service counts as an offsite copy, but you still need two more, typically one on your computer and one in cold storage (ex: external hard drive).
Treat cloud storage like you treat your hard drive, it can fail at any time. The failure modes are different: mechanical failure vs losing access to your account, but the end result is the same: the system is unreliable and you have to engineer around it.
I think applying these traditional schemes to SaaS environments (now called cloud) can be misleading
When people want off-site backups, the server owner can say they've already taken care of that. I'd say that having a copy under your own control is a separate checkbox we should include!
Good advice. Though I’d say you can count the cloud storage as 2 copies. They typically replicate the data to three drives, that covers all the typical failure modes you’d normally get when running a drive yourself. Then with a simple click you can even get a replica in another region.
The third backup being in a decoupled system on site is what you now count as your ”offsite” backup. Having this last copy is non-negotiable, no matter how many 9s S3 claim to have.
How do I get it out of their cloud? It works as a backup to my phone, but I'd still want another copy that I can access regardless of whether I've got access to that phone number right now. Sorting that out with the carrier can take a while
What's (to me) much more exciting to me is the incremental local backups they're working on. I've iirc looked into how to decode these big backup files, and copy them off my phone semi-regularly, but this being rsyncable will make the process much faster
I assume the process is basically to restore from cloud on device and then export a local backup. But I don't recall them saying anything specific about that. The incremental backups do sound really nice.
That sounds like it'll require access to the phone number to set it up on a new device, and that's assuming the user promptly has the funds for a new device
Even if it works for desktop clients also, that still needs to be set up using a data matrix scanned by the mobile device (or if that's already done before you lost the origin device, you can "simply" extract the faux-encrypted sqlite format that the desktop client uses, albeit with having to recompile this encryption extension for Sqlite manually — ask me how I know..)
> even with Grooveshark being down it still works!
Wait what, how does (did?) that work?
And more importantly (I can find the opus files myself): can/could it retrieve my account data to know which songs to download?
I've been able to partially reconstruct my music from localStorage, downloaded songs on my phone (yay for having root and access to that data folder), and memory, but it's still incomplete
Fwiw, here's my own little contribution to getting song data from Grooveshark, in my first blog post: https://lgms.nl/blog-1 (not my first blog site though). Happy to meet other fans :D
This probably doesn't qualify as a non-tech type answer, but I have a Synology NAS which includes a feature (CloudSync?) to automatically download Google Drive documents in docx, xlsx, etc. format.
There's sadly no silver bullet, especially for non-techies. To me it's like buying vegan products where available: I can't trivially become vegan with no effort, but I can affect market forces by preferentially buying things that align with that ideal. People could at least apply this where possible and buy products where they're in control somehow
For storage platforms like Dropbox or Onedrive, it can be as simple as ctrl+c'ing the data out of there every now and then
For Spotify, you can do the GDPR export and check that you can open it somehow. Even if it's not super readable, you can figure that out (with a tech friend or LLM perhaps) if you turn out to ever need it
For Signal, I've got no idea. The format is hard to work with for hardcore techies. They really really don't want you, ahem, attackers to get that data in the clear. (Two-sided coin). Make sure to turn on the backups, write down the passphrase, and take them off your phone every now and then, and hope there's a restore method when you need it
Perhaps there's a market for this. An automated or semi-automated backup of many cloud services. It could probably be as simple as doing a gdpr request in some cases.
That's not necessarily simple though, because some companies are shady and ass about it. And then if you want to pursue the matter, be ready to face significant effort needed to file a proper complaint in the correct channels for that.
Fwiw, GDPR has a forgotten clause that data exports need to also be provided in machine-readable format for easy service migrations and promoting competition / reducing vendor lock-in
The only reason I can imagine why nobody implements this, is that they like the status quo where it's hard to switch to their service, but equally hard to switch away. Once this becomes commonplace (e.g. because vendor A makes users aware it's a thing by implementing it for migrating from vendor B), vendor B will "retaliate" and A will have to truly be better than vendor B to retain said users
That is all to say, this might yet totally be a viable and legally unblockable business avenue for a third party to initiate. I'm just not sure there's enough demand to warrant (read: pay for) the effort involved. Maybe if you can have an LLM read the api docs of the service where you want to do the import and autogenerate a mostly-working version?
It is, but I think most people would care to at least have the song list, even if they'd need to go out and buy the corresponding data if they stop using the streaming service, or manually enter it into another streaming service
I can't tell whether I'm being super paranoid but I've been burned by Google so many times on product sunsets that I've just removed all of my data from them.
I managed to set up private self-hosted versions of an email client, photo viewing app, and barebones alternative to Docs and Sheets. Switched from Google to Kagi, and Chrome to Brave, but generally keep my own bookmarks of sites to use rather than using search engines.
I still run a skeleton Pixel, but the storage is almost exclusively just a very limited range of apps I use. I managed to get Google One storage from about 700GB to about 700Mb over the course of the last month or so.
Sounds like you're not using something like Nextcloud (which should cover all your bases it seems). Any particular reason, any experiences you want to share?
I just sort of wanted to learn how to build (rudimentary) versions of the same apps I've always used made by other companies/people, and like the idea of the data being as clean as possible. I'm a bit of a data purist, so I store all of my photos unedited, and keep all of my text documents as simple as possible (minimal formatting, data-heavy).
I'm also wary of just moving from one product to another, with the hassle of transferring things over constantly, security breaches, product sunsetting and all of those sorts of things.
I'm on a similar page. I try to set things up so that as many things as possible are regular files in my folder structure, which I then sync across devices. In my experience those are the only files I can rely on being able to retrieve long-term. Eg I don't use a photo app at all, I just have a folder with sub-folders (where I copy them manually). I don't know (yet) how Nextcloud fits with that, but it has several features that look really interesting in general (eg video calls).
I'm working on De-Googling. I now have a Mac and an iPhone instead of Windows/Android, but switching from Drive to iCloud seems a fairly parallel move.
I also set up my first home server with RAID NAS. It's on my list to spin up an OpenOffice container or something I can use to replace Google Sheets. That will let me delete my Drive data; next is Google Photos and eventually Gmail.
It took about a week for me to completely de-Google from scratch.
Drive was easy enough to download everything off, but the real pain in the arse was Google Photos. I had something like 250 individual 2GB zip files and the supplementary metadata was separated off of the image files themselves. I had to put together some Python scripts to clean up all the different file naming formats over the years (PIXL_YYYYMMDD, IMG_YYYYMMDD) into just YYYYMMDDD, and reattach the metadata, and then check through that everything was safely downloaded before deleting the Google Photos.
Google Photos had some weird caching issues where it kept showing images I'd deleted and emptied from the bin, which was a little concerning. They were only appearing on my phone and persisted multiple times after clearing the cache. I couldn't find them anywhere in the phones internal storage.
That was Google Takeout! Although in retrospect I did find larger ZIP size options after doing the original export. But it filled Google Drive with 700GB of folders, so I just stuck with downloading the 2GB ones.
Is your home server LAN only or have you configured it in some way to be accessible and secure on the internet? I'm interested in setting up a fileserver myself but I'm not sure what the latest is on security.
I definitely don't open a bunch of ports to the internet! I use Wireguard to VPN back into my home network from my mobile devices. Wireguard only responds to packets that contain a valid preconfigured crypto key, so while the WG port is technically "open" it doesn't respond to a port scanner.
Tailscale is a great place to start. It uses a VPN to access your servers while outside of your LAN while avoiding the security risk of them being wide open to the internet.
So the way I understand Tailscale is that it's built on top of Wireguard; Tailscale claims it's "easier to use" but I haven't found Wireguard to be difficult to configure at all. Are there any extra benefits to using Tailscale that I'm overlooking?
Yes, Tailscale uses Wireguard. If you can use Wireguard, that is great. That is not an option for many people who are behind a CGNAT and/or do not have the ability to setup port forwarding. Tailscale also makes it easier for sharing access with other users.
Through my kDrive subscription, I get access to their own instance of OnlyOffice
It looks a bit dated like MS Office, but it does the job and since it used MS Office formats, I can edit the documents with Libre Office or other sofwares.
And using the API, I can programatically access those files.
I just developed a webapp for it. I only used Docs for personal reasons, so my own version is basically just a really stripped down rich text editor. A lot of things I just save to .txt files.
It saves (both locally and to self-hosting) to JSON and, exports to PDF and HTML. And then I wrote a script to convert docx files over when I migrated from Google.
Sheets is the one thing I haven't found a good self-hosted alternative to.
I tried Nextcloud a couple of years ago but found it really buggy and slow. Even the basic notes editor on Android was absolutely terrible. Absolutely no comparison to what I'm using now, Obsidian with Syncthing.
Can anyone recommend a good sheets alternative other than Nextcloud?
I assume you're talking about the free consumer tier?
Nothing like that should happen if you're paying for even an individual Workspace plan. You get a phone number for customer support, and it works.
Google shuts down free accounts when it believes they're being used for fraud/spam. And because scammers and spammers create them at virtually zero cost, and will fake activity to build account credibility until using them for nefarious purposes, that does mean legitimate free accounts occasionally get caught.
Regular backups are important no matter what though. Obviously Takeout exists, but there are lots of third-party automated backup solutions as well that will automatically convert Sheets files to .xlsx as part of the backup process. I use one that backs up nightly to my NAS.
> Nothing like that should happen if you're paying for even an individual Workspace plan. You get a phone number for customer support, and it works.
Last I was a workspace Admin, you had to login to get the phone number and the code to dial once you called.
It certainly did get you to a human. Unfortunately, they were not empowered to actually help with any of the things I needed help with, even when it would just be filing a enhancement request with the product team (they just tell you to post in the unmonitored product forum)
I've seen several believable tales of Kafkaesque billing issues leading to Workspace accounts being suspended. It took months to get them to do invoice billing.
>You get a phone number for customer support, and it works.
I don't believe this after decades of past experience with them trying to find any human to contact. Have you seen the phone number yourself? Normally they just give you the runaround trying to navigate a maze of support pages.
The worst customer support experiences of my life have been from Google, both while using Google Fi personally and GCP while working at Replit in its early days. Thankfully I'm no longer using either of those products now.
Plenty of reports of people getting locked out of their Workspace accounts. Google even occasionally burns developers they have deals and working relationships with.
Just don't use any Google services. Not free, not paid (why would you send them money???!?!). Not for personal stuff, not for work projects. Not for throwaway data, not for important data.
That's a feature of any SaaS. Adobe frequently shuts down ETLA customers due their own invoice processing failures. I can think of three significant government subdivisions that were unable to access any M365 service for 1-10 days as a result of a reseller change.
The real lesson here is that you need to understand the failure domains of the technology your business depends on. Your business is as good as the contracts you rely on. We're relatively good at preparing for IT failure, but not so much the other stuff. For small businesses, key revenue generation could be stopped by an employee doing something dumb with a corporate card.
The real lesson here is that almost all modern SaaS applications have massively under invested in customer support in order to appear more profitable or sustainable than they really are. One of the major factors behind LLM development is trying to solve this problem before the house of cards falls down. Companies were enticed by the recurring revenue of SaaS, but don't want to pay for the level of support required when you are responsible for all your customers data as well as their access to the service.
> Plenty of reports of people getting locked out of their Workspace accounts
None substantiating the "most AI-kafkaesque process imaginable to regain access" upthread though. I mean, I don't know what you're citing specifically, but yes, obviously: business relationships like everything else get tangled up sometimes. People's electricity gets shut off incorrectly, people's Doordash orders arrive with the wrong stuff, phone bills arrive without the promised discounts; everything sucks, kinda.
But if you're paying the solution is to call your support contact and have them sort it out. And that works at Google the same way it does everywhere else.
You're right about google's track record but at heart yours is a comment about third-party cloud dependency, not google. As you mention, offline storage solves this and another commenter mentioned msft will ban you also (but you dont hear about it because...offline storage)
Track record is a factor that you should consider.
When companies buy services from others they often ensure that the contract has protection from things like this. They have clauses that the data belongs to them. They have clauses about what happens if the company is sold. They have clauses about abandoning the product. They have a number of other things added that I'm not aware of.
You as a single individual (and often as a small business) don't have the power to get that into a contract. However you still should read the fine print - you should go elsewhere if it the fine print is against you.
We bought a Google Workspace subscription for a building I help manage and I was shocked when I found out that you can't archive emails for discovery/legal purposes unless you buy a more expensive subscription that has access to the "vault."
I've never heard a rant about people being banned, but i can think of a half dozen people who have lost their icloud accounts due to the combo of inexplicably not remembering or writing down their passwords and selling or losing a phone.
That's the opposite than ban by Apple. And also for this people can go to an apple store or call support right? unless they enable the most nuclear e2e option.
My dad got a Trojan and they took over his msft account to buy some Xbox cards. They banned him as well but he took them to small claims in the EU. As usual they didn't show up and he got a ruling to reinstate his account. Was under 100 bucks and he got his account back. If the account is really important I would do the same. There is a 90% chance they won't show.
just as a point of interest, in US small claims courts, the judge can award monetary damages, but cannot order somebody to do something (like turn your account on) i'm not sure if this varies by state.
This comment prompted me to go look at the various spreadsheet software available, since I was only familiar with the usual Excel / GS / Libre. There is also GNOME's Gnumeric, KDE's Calligra, Apple's Numbers, an online variant of LibreOffice called Collabora, an Excel clone made by a German company called PlanMaker, a Latvian effort called OnlyOffice, and then probably the most unusual variant, but somehow it isn't surprising that somebody made a spreadsheet based on Python:
I use Google sheets myself from time to time, but I regularly do backups of the sheets I'm working on, or anything important I have access to. I've been in the hole before, for reasons I still do not understand, and it was one of the most frustrating "customer support" processes I've ever experienced, and it took years.