Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

I spent the past month "de-Googling" my life after I saw a notice in my Gmail inbox that it was 20 years old. I took a step back and realized just how invested into the Google ecosystem I was. Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Maps, Keep, Photos, YouTube, FitBit, Android. Basically my entire digital life. My goal was more diversifying than security/privacy, but security/privacy is a really nice bonus.

I ended up going with Proton because they had a good solution for mail, calendar, and drive which I was looking to replace. I set up my custom domain to point to it and have my Gmail forwarding to it - any time I get an email to the old Gmail address I go change it on the website or delete the account altogether.

For Google Docs / Keep, I switched over to Obsidian and pay for the sync there. It's a great replacement for my main use case of Docs / Keep which is just a dumping ground for ideas.

For Google Photos, I now self-host Immich in Hetzner on a VPS with a 1TB storage box mounted via SSHFS. I use Tailscale to connect to it. It took a few days to use Google Takeout + immich-go to upload all the photos (~300GB of data) but it's working really well now. Only costs $10/mo for the VPS and 1TB of storage.

Android I think I'll be stuck on - I have a Pixel 8 Pro that technically supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there. Next time I need a new phone I'll take a serious look at Fairphone but I think the Pixel 8 Pro should last a few more years.

My FitBit Versa is really old and starting to die - I ordered one of the new Pebble watches and am patiently waiting for it to ship!

YouTube I'm stuck on because that's where the content is. I have yet to find a suitable replacement for Google Maps - OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.

I am very interested in moving my photos and data to a self-hosted solution but am a little anxious about backups.

Do you simply trust hetzner to not lose the data on your 1TB storage box?

(I am aware that I am currently trusting google and dropbox to do just that.)

Back it up to S3 glacier, or to Backblaze. The cost of it is pretty low, much lower than a VPS / bare metal box + 1 TB cost for the photo app hosting.

Technically I have no big doubts about S3 Glacier.

But what happens if you don't use that stuff for a long time. You are in hospital when the bill needs to get paid. Your credit card gets stolen and the number needs to changed. Whatever personal crisis that you are not able to take care of life as usual for some weeks. They will just delete your data before you are back in business.

Does anyone know how long it takes, how many warning mails will come? I have very little data in AWS, but I more or less constantly feeling it might happen to me. Maybe not because of such big crisis, but just the simple fact that my bank will reject the automatic payment requiring a PSD2 second factor and I miss the email...

It takes a couple of months for an unpaid AWS account to get it suspended. Then you have 30 days to reactivate it. Then you have 90 days before the data are actually wiped from the Glacier. You have half a year, or maybe more, to get your backup data.

The price of Glacier Deep Archive is roughly $1/mo per terabyte. (I struggled to produce 500 GB of photos in 15 years.) Set up a dedicated AWS account, put $50 on it, set up a yearly auto-payment of $10, and you're likely safe for several years of nonpayment.

Retrieval is not free though, something like $20-40 for retrieval from tape, and about $90 for a terabyte of egress traffic. Okay for the rare occasion of a full restore.

Backblaze B2 is $6/mo per terabyte, and they only give you 44 days of grace period before deletion for nonpayment. But the traffic is free either way, up to 3x the amount stored per month. They are good for frequent full backups, and for doing full restores periodically.