Comment by MrDresden
4 years ago
I keep telling anyone who will listen that they need to move every aspect of their online identity away from the big tech giants, and make sure that each type of service (email, webpage, memory storage, document storage, backups, contacts, etc) is compartmentalized in such a way that if one gets removed then it wont affect the others in any way.
Imagine having all your memories in the form of images and videos taken away because of sloppy review work at a tech company.
I want to, really I do, but it feels like trading one devil for another.
Email is by far the biggest albatross around my neck. To migrate email requires me to setup two different failure points: purchase a domain and a Fastmail-like service. Now that is two different places that are subject to me forgetting to pay a bill, being social engineered into giving away my account, etc. To say nothing of the long tail of acquaintances who only know be my current address.
Yet still, this existential terror exists that I will Do Something Wrong (no you will never know what it was), and lose everything.
E-mail should be the first thing you migrate, precisely because it is the key to every other service you rely on. If you're randomly banned from your E-mail service, you're pretty much screwed. E-mail is too important to let someone else host. Move it as close to your own control as your technical ability allows. Do it today, in fact, do it right now.
+1! Getting your own domain name is not hard, you can still use GMail with it for now, and switch to something else if there's a problem with it. Plus xyz@yourowndomain.com is way cooler than xyz@gmail.com.
Autopay is simple to set up with any hosting provider. If you're in a financial place where the $5/mo and $10/yr payments might bounce... yeah, probably don't pay for email.
As far as the social engineering goes, personally I gladly take that risk in order to bring my email firmly into my control. If I'm going to lose access to my email, I want it to be because I did something stupid, not because an algorithm flagged my account and Google has no humans I can appeal to.
The long tail of acquaintances isn't bad either: just forward emails from Gmail to your new address. If you lose access to the Gmail account at some point, you'd have lost everything anyway, so this arrangement would be strictly better.
I'm not fully confident that I'll never cancel a credit card that pays annual subscription. Generally it's fine because alert email would come on my inbox, but it's email infrastructure so I need extra attention.
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My pictures and videos are synced to iCloud, Google Photos, and MS OneDrive. My photos are synced to Amazon Drive too.
Do you use the same email or 2FA for all of those? If so, you still have a potential single point of failure if that provider decides to ban your account.
It is unlikely that both the email and 2FA will fail you at the same time, unless perhaps you are using gmail and Google authenticator (though I am not sure how much authenticator is tied to your Google identity as I don't use it).
Use email, phone and app 2FA plus printable 2FA codes, and you'll always have a way.
Frankly if all of these can be made inaccessible in one go then the setup was mighty flawed to begin with.
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No.
- iCloud 2FA is another Apple device.
- I don’t care enough about my Google account to have 2FA. Besides the occasional SMS.
- Microsoft 2FA is Microsoft Authenticator.
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That sounds sorta expensive but I get it. I’m at 3tb of photos and videos. It’s becoming unmanageable… anyone aware of an self hosted multi redundancy photo storage that doesn’t involve manual copying of large amounts of files? Or other non time consuming setups that works with iPhones (me and my SO)?
I use Backblaze B2 and ‘PhotoSync’. PhotoSync is great in any case, as it can push and pull from basically anywhere. The only issue is it’s phone based.
OneDrive - part of the $99 Office365 subscription. You get 1TB each up to 6 users
Apple iCloud - 2TB as part of a bundle.
Google Drive - I haven’t had to start paying for it yet.
Amazon Drive - part of Amazon Prime
I just do real time photos to iCloud or google, and full backup of everything to backblaze.
This event happens so rarely that it would be better advice to tell people to wear a bullet proof vest and helmet when going outside. It’s more likely to benefit them than self hosting media.
> This event happens so rarely
Does it though?
Also: I wear a helmet or a belt every single time I drive even for 1km. Should I not? I never needed them. 0% use rate so far for me, might as well not have done it.
The issue is that when it happens, you're done.
Considering that you probably don't need to keep all your eggs in one basket, why not at least try?
On this note, I wish providers were forced to provide a third-party backup mechanism for important data so that if I were to lose:
- the email: it could forward my email to at least receive them
- my photos: a copy could be kept on multiple hostings
etc
Anecdote: It's happened twice for me. Once was for an app I published they decided was against ToS, two years after I published it. And the other was an accidental account deletion when upgrading Google Apps (luckily this one was mostly recoverable... if you know the right people at Google).
You don't need to self-host, there are plenty of alternatives for each service offered by google.
The problem is finding them. If a layman looks for a cloud back up provider that isn't one of the BigTech group - uses Duck Duck Go and finds a small company offering 10GB back up for free. Unfortunately for them, that service is using AWS for storage, so ultimately despite they're best effort they're just using amazon cloud storage.
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How do you know how often it happens?