Moving away from Google services, 8 years in

Moving away from Google services, 8 years in(maximevaillancourt.com)

33 points by vaillancourtmax 4 years ago | 18 comments

storafrid 4 years ago |

Replacing Google Photos with hard drives? What. And replacing Google Drive with a client-based sync tool...? Maybe too high expectations but I was hoping for some level of similar functionality.

Would be interesting to get advice on how an actual user of the Google ecosystem can do this kind of move. There are a lot of applications to research, e.g. Photoprism for replacing Google Photos. A bit overwhelming to review the options and make feature/setup comparisons, considering how many products I use on a daily basis. But it would be nice indeed, to own the data. If the overhead is manageable.

vaillancourtmax 4 years ago | |

(author here)

Thanks for the feedback!

I realize I wasn't actually using Google Photos, so my recommendation of hard drives likely isn't realistic for most people. TIL about Photoprism, I'll look into it.

For Google Drive, an actual solution for a typical use case would be something like Nextcloud (self-hosted or not, doesn't matter). My own use case was only about sharing a single file between two machines, so Syncthing fit the bill perfectly.

Again, thanks for sharing your thoughts :)

hanklazard 4 years ago | | |

To get your data offsite, swap one of your photo drives with a safe deposit box … I think I pay about 50$ per year at BofA. It’s handy for a few bar drives and for critical important docs.

blakeinate 4 years ago | |

My solution ended up being a mix of Backblaze B2 buckets, Nextcloud (linked to B2 using S3 Nextcloud features) and FileBrowser Pro on IOS (which is much faster than Nextcloud for photo upload, links directly to Backblaze). Costs me less than 10 cents a month at this point.

DavideNL 4 years ago | | |

Interesting;

I just purchased FileBrowser Pro for my iPad, but after adding my Backblaze B2 bucket i just get an authorization error. Recreated the keys, still not working…

llimos 4 years ago | |

I have about 245 GB of photos and videos. I switched to 2 hard drives + pCloud (under $50 a year for 500GB).

It helped that I'd always had the hard drives while still on Google Photos.

shaicoleman 4 years ago |

A few recommendations:

* Google Authenticator => Aegis Authenticator

https://getaegis.app/

* Google Maps => Windy Maps / Maps.me

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.wind...

https://maps.me/

LazyR0B0T 4 years ago | |

I would recommend Organic Maps. Description: "Organic Maps offers fast offline maps app for travelers, tourists, hikers and cyclists based on top of crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap data and curated with love by MAPS.ME founders."

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.organicmap...

And those that use F-droid

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.organicmaps/

vaillancourtmax 4 years ago | | |

Thanks! I read good things about Organic Maps, I'll try it out.

tinus_hn 4 years ago | |

For Google Authenticator on iPhone I would recommend Authenticator by Mark Rubin:

Fast

Light

Free

Allows you to backup all tokens in an encrypted backup (not iCloud)

yonixw 4 years ago | |

Serious question

Why should I replace Google Authenticator? Since many concerns that are valid, such as (1) you don't own the data, (2) you might be banned any day and (3) your data might be used for ads, doesn't exist in this case?

shaicoleman 4 years ago | | |

* Search

* Open source

* Encryption

* Biometric/password authentication

* Import/Export

* Backup/Sync

Nextgrid 4 years ago | | |

It's down to trust. Google has a financial incentive to stalk people, has demonstrated that they are willing to use dark patterns to make people act against their own interest when it comes to privacy and their current data processing consent flow (supposedly for GDPR compliance) doesn't actually comply with it.

Let's say you were hiring for a security guard for a bank. You have 2 candidates.

One is a former bank robber, isn't particularly wealthy (so has an financial incentive to rob again) but totally claims he is trustworthy and will no longer rob banks.

The other has no bank-robbing history and happens to have other sources of income meaning they don't have a financial incentive to rob the bank.

Morals or laws around hiring former offenders aside, which one do you pick?

Sure, you can keep a close watch on the ex bank-robber to prevent future incidents just like you can decompile and reverse-engineer Google Authenticator's every update (and do so preemptively before installing said updates), or you can just go with an option that has no demonstrated history of being malicious and has little incentive to do so.

vaillancourtmax 4 years ago | |

Thank you for mentioning Aegis, a few other folks have recommended it as well. Looks promising!

mastrsushi 4 years ago |

>”I simply punch in the IP address of my Raspberry Pi, tack the port where the Miniflux service is running at, and log in. Easy!”

lol

endofreach 4 years ago |

Does anyone know a web calendar client like google calendar? I really love the UX of Google Calendar & Gmail...

yosito 4 years ago | |

For me, Nextcloud's web calendar works well. Though I use native apps for most of my calendar usage.