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I have been slowly extricating myself from the knotted vines of Google's multifarious services.
The process _could_ be quite straightforward: just delete the account and be done with it. However, I would like to retrieve my data slowly and systematically (well, in theory) and migrate to free and open services or at least just have it stored and backed-up locally.
To this end, I've spent the last week or so combing through a decade's worth of material in Google Photos, comparing it all to what I already have saved from phones and cameras over the years, deleting the cruft and duplicates, or downloading to plug the gaps in my local record. I have done this mostly 'by hand' as it's been fun digging through all these old photos and I can be sure I am keeping the worthwhile images.
I think the thing I would miss most from losing Google Photos is the search function; being able to locate images with certain features or from particular locations has been useful so hopefully I will find a replacement gallery-type software with the same abilities. For now though, all my photos are back under my control which is comforting. I would not be surprised if Google Photos suddenly expires in much the same way as Google Play Music is about to, and I suddenly find all my stuff transmuted into some new format and only available through a fancy new subscription service which has moved my data a few extra steps further away from my reach ... all for my safety and convenience, of course.
I also pulled everything important off my Google Drive. I have used SyncThing for many many years now and it works great. It doesn't have a 'share this file/folder' functionality like DropBox or Drive but I haven't found that to be problem. I can use my Diskstation's sharing feature (this works very well) or I could set up NextCloud if needed later.
I also started tackling 'saved passwords'. I have been using BitWarden for a while, after initially trying out LastPass. LastPass was fine and I made good use of the duplicate/weak suggestions to convert all my accounts to unique and strong passwords but in the end I favoured the open-source BitWarden with its potential to host my own version of it in the future. Still, Google holds a lot of passwords from the many years that I was using Chrome and Chromium as my browsers. I exported them from my Google Account page and double-checked that I wasn't missing any from my BitWarden collection (I was) or that I had removed accounts from services I wasn't using any longer (I hadn't). Then I found a handy trick for deleting them from Google: using the 'obvious' way in Google's Password Manager is quite inefficient because you have to do each deletion separately; there's no 'select all' option (it's not in Google's interest to expedite data loss!). However, you can go to the 'account sync' area (on the Google Accounts site) and disable syncing with Chrome. This deletes all the 'server side' copies of bookmarks and saved passwords, autofill forms etc. I already have backups of my old bookmarks so this was a quick way to flush another section of my Google Life into oblivion.
During this password cleanup, I realised that I had a couple of other ancient and unused Google accounts created over the last fifteen or so years since I very first signed up to Gmail. It's been quite an odd (but fun) experience opening these time capsules; changes in the direction of my life usually correlate with the sort fresh-start clean-slate behaviours, such as getting a new email address. You know, because I've outgrown the 'hotboi99@service' moniker (for example!). The emails go back a lot further than the photos and it was fun to see the change in both over the years.
Anyway, having been distracted by nostalgia I shall push on with Project Disconnection. I have got myself a ProtonMail account, as they seem to know what they're doing, and I will starting using that instead of Google for personal communcations. I went for the lowest paid tier and pointed a domain I had lying around at it. I will use the @pm.me address for site registrations and the @old-domain for personal communications, but it all goes to the same bucket.
For my @gmail addresses, I have connected them all to Thunderbird via IMAP. I have done the Google Takeout as well, but it's much easier to have a copy in an email client in case I need to dig something out later. I have a lot of emails tagged with 'labels', which appear as folders in Thunderbird. With those and the 'Inbox' and 'All Mail' labels/folders there can be a lot of duplicated entries. To sort that out, I have made a folder for each email account in Thunderbird's 'Local Folders' inbox. Then I have copied over all the label-folders which I created for that account. Some emails will have multiple labels and show up in multiple folders but there are not that many. I am many concerned with deduplicating from Inbox and All Mail. Once all the label-folders are created, I delete the messages from within the folders, then the folder (deleting the folder with the emails still there just removes the 'label' while the emails remain in All Mail and Inbox). This leaves behind unlabelled emails in Inbox and All Mail, which can then be copied to their local folder in Thunderbird. Once I have a copy of everything locally, I can disconnect the IMAP account in Thunderbird.
After that, the next trick before the Google account is shut down is to update any websites which use that email for account logins or recovery etc. I will assume that if a login with that email is in my BitWarden stash then it can be updated. Any services that use it but which are not found in my password list well, I can probably safely abandon those.
I expect I will keep these Google accounts 'live' for the next 12 months and if nothing crops up requiring them then they can be deleted around this time next year.
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