> So how do you know those services don't pull the same stunt?

It's a questions of eggs per basket. Google wants you to keep everything in their one basket, and the result is that if they arbitrarily terminate your account, you lose everything. If they give you 30 days like OP, you have to remember all the different places you need to download content from.

If you split your services up, a sudden termination only affects a few things rather than everything, and a forewarned termination has a much smaller surface area you need to consider.

> If they give you 30 days like OP, you have to remember all the different places you need to download content from.

Google Takeout (takeout.google.com) should give you almost everything in one place. It's a good idea to do this periodically in case you don't get the 30-day notice. Be prepared to download a few dozen GB, though. And there is no "incremental" option.

Takeout is nice, but I am surprised by the lack of features in other products that would easily allow to import the data from Takeout format.

I wanted to migrate from Google Photos to iCloud. Turns out there is no easy way how to import the photos to iCloud without loosing metadata. I gave up and just bought more storage on Google.

I agree with you there. All the data is right there, in fairly open (if not exactly standard) formats. They even include an index document and basic descriptions of the data formats. One would think their competitors would want to make it easy to port exports from Google Takeout into their systems.

I'm a bit surprised that you had trouble importing photos, though. Isn't most of the metadata kept in standard EXIF tags in each file?

Everything has benefits and drawbacks of course. It's true that you can minimize the impact of one service pulling this stunt.

However, I don't agree with "remember all the different places you need to download content from". Google does this with Takeout, so I can have 1 backup of most of my things. When using different services, I need to have various backups.

Reason is: I don't depend on services giving me 30 days. I assume they can block access on the spot.

Obsidian is a self-hosted repository that ultimately stores everything as plaintext markdown (.md). It is 100% portable and by default owned by you.

Protip: you can easily sync obsidian by sharing the top-level vault directory with syncthing. Its entirely transparent, you just start obsidian and open the vault, and changes you make on one system automatically appear on others.

As for protonmail, its better than google -- but you're right in the data ownership. In the case of protonmail, they have a much better track record than Google, but if you are really paranoid choose a service that supports SMTP/SNMP. You can then just have a mail client store the mail as an archive or connect it to any other mail system.

I have mentioned my preferences before, but I'll refrain from turning this comment into an unpaid ad. Drew Devault's recommendations are pretty good though: https://drewdevault.com/2020/06/19/Mail-service-provider-rec...

I think you mean IMAP. Protonmail supports SMTP (the mail-sending protocol; it needs to to interoperate with other mail servers) but not IMAP (the client side mail-reading protocol).

SNMP is something entirely unrelated, afaik.

Ah, yes you're correct. Total brain fart, unfortunately too late to edit so my mistake must live on in infamy...

ProtonMail offers an “IMAP Bridge” application that keeps a local IMAP server running on your machine, while still decrypting your messages on-device.

Depends on the service. For example, if proton bans me I can move my email to a different provider because I own my domain. In case of Obsidian, it's an offline app that uses Markdown, so I can easily migrate to a different note-taking software for any reason.

Your backup note is on point; I highly recommend everyone to do a Google Takeout every few months (or at least years!!). If you've never done one, like most Google users, you're playing with fire.

Notice that Google Takeout is broken with regards to non-UTF8 email encodings (for some of you who archive old emails). I noticed it when coding a small tool https://github.com/karteum/gmvaultdb to (among other things) import the mbox from Takeout into an sqlite DB : Google performs some encoding conversions that permanently break all non-ascii characters in non-UTF8 emails (they are all replaced by 0xEFBFBD). In order to archive old emails, I had to use mbsync with IMAP (gmvault does not work anymore with Python 3, and I didn't try yet https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back ).

I think for email it makes sense to have an offline IMAP setup (i.e. a copy of all mail is downloaded) on at least one device (e.g. your desktop) so that you can still access things if you are abruptly cut off from the provider. This can come in handy even for temporary outages.

I agree, but an an alternative to mbox/maildir format on your machine : I wrote https://github.com/karteum/gmvaultdb in order to have a single-file SQLite DB with all old email contents (all UTF-8 inside, simple/minimalistic schema), together with a small GUI to consult emails and do queries (full-text not fully implemented yet but this is the target) and all attachments extracted in a side folder so that I can directly browse with a file manager.

If your domain registar bans you, you’ll lose your email all the same.

“GoDaddy has two major problems.

First, their customer service (…).

Second, if there are accusations made against you, they will shut you down and side with your accuser more often than not.“ https://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discuss...

> If your domain registar bans you, you’ll lose your email all the same.

Maybe? I would hope that you could raise the issue with the dowmain registry or ultimately ICANN if the registrar does not let you move the domain elsewhere after banning you. Registrars do not have the same platform ownership over domains that Google has over gmail accounts, they are just middlemen.

Domain registrars are indeed a single point of failure :(. Do you recommend something here? Because I haven't found a proper solution myself.

Fair point. I think in this case relying on a domain registrar or an email service is somewhat inevitable, though.

Proton, or fastmail, or any number of other mail providers for that matter, don't control half of the internet. They don't associate personal accounts with professional accounts, and they can't block necessary services at a whim.

> they can't block necessary services at a whim

why not?

Because they don't _control half the internet_. They only have one service you use, not 50. Your phone (voice), cloud storage (drive), website hosting (sites), chat (not even gonna try), music streaming (YouTube music), video hosting, etc aren't all dependent on the same single point of failure like they are with Google. All your mail provider can do is stop processing your email for you (at which point you switch providers). If Google doesn't like you, you lose _all_ of those things, likely all at once. Google even has a hand in your credit card transactions with Google Pay (though anecdotally, I've never actually seen anyone use Google Pay, so not sure how many people that would affect). Google provides such a diverse range of services that having them all shut down on you is a huge deal. I'm currently in the process of looking for a replacement for my legacy Google apps account, and that's just email.

Thanks for explaining, I was curious too. I only use Google for email hosting out of your list. I can understand how people are deep in that ecosystem though.

When they start growing close to the size of Google you could start worrying about this type of problem. With smaller players you could reach them easier if something happens, especially if they care about their customers. Ultimately nothing is guaranteed so backing up the data regularly is a good idea but that's not the only problem though, a lot of people's identity is tied to some services that if they stop functioning for them they're in a bit of a nightmare situation.