Same here. Those shitty providers are a too high risk.

Many years ago Microsoft has banned my outlook account for no reason. I tried contacting the support to resolve the issue - nothing. Only after writing a letter, I received the answer from Microsoft Germany:

We banned your account because I was distributing porn through onedrive (which I was not doing). The investigation showed that Microsoft could not find any wrongdoing. The account was gone nevertheless.

This is why I say:

- skip Gmail/Outlook and all this crap, use something proper like mailbox.org with your own domain - dont trust cloud. Backup once a month, use two clouds at the same time, have a cold storage with your backups - biggest risk is your apple icloud account. dont be dependant on them: dont use their credit card - dont use google/ms 2fa apps - have multiple accounts in parallel: one for google drive, one for search, one for mail (if you need it), one for youtube, etc

Isn't the ability to migrate phone numbers a legal requirement for carriers?

Edit: yeah it is [1]

> Phone companies are required by law to port your number out when you start service with a new carrier. According to the FCC, a company can't refuse to port your number even if you have an outstanding balance or unpaid termination fees.

[1] https://telzio.com/blog/what-to-do-when-a-carrier-refuses-to...

When porting to a new carrier, the new carrier asks for your account information and PIN for the old carrier. The new carrier provides that to the old carrier to prove that the port request came from you.

It looks like with Google you are supposed use the Google Fi app or website to obtain a “port out number” and PIN [1] to give the new carrier when they ask for account number and PIN.

If you accounts have been banned I wonder if you can still get that information?

[1] https://support.google.com/fi/answer/10888419?hl=en

Haven't had to do this with google (yet) but filing a complaint with the FCC usually gets you a very prompt response from the company the complaint is about, and I imagine this would be the best thing to do in this case https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us

Yes, people have successfully sent FCC complaints to restore their Google Voice accounts (and Google Accounts as a consequence): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31070914

As it looks from LinkedIn comments, they still do.

This is why I’m something of a two factor authentication Luddite. I (think) I understand the benefits - but the fact that every factor is an additional single point of failure freaks me out.

TOTP keys, backed up physically (as in, written down and stored somewhere safe), are probably a good way to balance the failure mode with the security.

Many (most?) things demanding my phone number as a ‘second factor’ don’t give that option, unfortunately.

You have to backup to 2FA keys. That's a must.

> The more eggs you have in one basket, the more likely the basket is to break

This. Use Yahoo for your email, Verizon for your phone number, Dropbox for your backups, Facebook for your socials… It doesn’t matter which you choose, but fragment your digital life. When one part goes bad, it won’t infect the others.

Honesty, I wish self hosting was easy enough for ordinary people to do. Then there would be no reason to recommend people to fragment their digital life among dozens of ad-funded SaaS platforms. There is no reason why it has to be so hard. But not enough effort has gone into developing such systems due to obvious reasons. Sandstorm project, for example pioneered a model where users could deploy web apps like they would install mobile apps on their phone. Sadly, it didn't achieve the level of popularity it needed.

> Honesty, I wish self hosting was easy enough for ordinary people to do.

Synology Diskstations are rather easy to setup and not very expensive.

Thank you for the pointer! Definitely something worth looking deeper into. However, I was talking more about the software side of things - so that we won't be locked into a hardware platform. That said, they do have an idea in the right direction.

I'm still totally not off Google yet but this is the direction I'm going in. Fastmail for email (still need to do the POP/IMAP setup for local caching using Thunderbird), local ISP for phone number, Syncthing for syncing across PCs/Android phones (except iOS which lives in its own world) and Facebook has been deleted long ago. Just takes a while to get off Google because of years of sign-ups but I already got the financial and government services off it.

I agree and have completely extracted myself from their ecosystem, but this isn't a reasonable expectation to push on the general public.

When I started using Google, their motto was still "Don't be evil." My entire business and personal life runs on it, so I have no way to switch. 300 employees emails, all documents, videos, tons of custom scripts would have to change over.

One solution to many of these concerns is a periodic backup (via Takeout) of your Google account.

I have tried this many times, and literally the only time it succeeded was when I had it exported to Google Drive.

It feels like they built it to say that you can, but your data is still just as locked as before…

Try fetching only your photos in one archive, your Gmail in a separate archive, and then everything else in a third.

If you have "too many" Google photos and that archive fails, create albums for every year, and only download a year/album at a time. It's a huge PITA, but at least you'll get your stuff back. (Kinda: depending on how you uploaded your photos, the metadata may come back truncated or altered).

Hmm, which part fails? Works great for me. You can schedule it to happen every 2 months for a year. And so every 2 months I get an email with links to 7 or so 50GB .tgz files. They download very quickly with no throttling and fully saturate my 1Gbs connection.

I've been getting mine as a large-ish (16GiB) TGZ type file for many years.

Do you have any suggestions for open-source Android backup solutions that can back up everything? Because I'm having a hard time finding any.

I have Nextcloud running on a Raspberry PI along with a dozen other services on yunohost.org. Nextcloud automatically backs up my family's contacts, calendars, notes, tasks, photos, files, passwords, bookmarks, phone locations and more. If you want to backup the APK's check out Seedvault. I am personally fine manually reinstalling APK's if/when needed so have not tried Seedvault yet.

Don't you need to backup apks if you want app data?

As for hosting... I just rent colo space and cut out all the cloud stuff.

You need root to backup all app data:

Neo Backup - Currently maintained, and available on fdroid.

Titanium backup and restore - I don't think it is still maintained, but it still works.

Seedvault which does not require root can't backup a lot of things.

Depending on your phone, you may be able to backup everything with twrp, but it doesn't work with some new-ish phones.

Why do you need root? How is google and all able to do it with their apps?

I'd be interested in automated backups/sync as well. Sounds like something like https://github.com/rtomac/cloud-services-backup-cli would do the trick...

This is not a "solution" - it just mitigates a portion of the disruption.

How does that help you get access to sites that you secured with Google MFA that you are now locked out of?

How do you automate this for daily backups?

Automating daily Google Takeout requests is exactly the sort of behaviour that I fear would trigger an account ban at some indeterminate future date. There are just too many unknown unknowns for me with Google now. Their ecosystem is, and has been for a while, personally relegated to burner account status.

I doubt that you can do this daily -- I don't think Takeout can work differentially.

Monthly or annual downloads though, can be scheduled manually simply by putting a note on your calendar.

If an account goes down, the thing you'll miss most may not be the recent things, but rather the many years of archives you might have in a Google account.

I moved that off too. Aurora Store in anonymous mode works great and also shows privacy info of each app

The biggest problem with Play store is that many apps are geographically restricted. That includes banking and public transport apps. Some apps are restricted without even the knowledge of the developer. Most of those apps have no good reason at all to be restricted like that. Such apps often cannot be accessed through Aurora. Sadly, there are no laws or provisions to challenge such unethical tactics. Using Google's services is like living with a manipulative and abusive partner.

Actually I use aurora to by pass geo fence like this all the time. You need search it int web browser and open in aurora, voila, you can install it

Interesting! I will try out that tip. Thank you!

Moved where? Not to iCloud, I hope?

Self-hosting mail, calendar and media is too complex task for 99% of population. This is not a solution.

Nowadays you can buy a NAS and plug it into your router and then click the install nextcloud option and you have it running, then you add the app on your phone. Its no where near as difficult to get these level of capability as it used to now that Docker is integrated in a user friendly way in a lot of NAS software.

I run a server at home and I’ve set up Nextcloud.

I don’t trust it to be more reliable than a paid service. The thing about self hosted solutions is you’re completely on your own if something goes wrong. You need to make sure you’re backing things up, that you can restore your Nextcloud configuration if your sql database takes a dump or you fat finger and delete some config files (I’ve done both). Or if you have a power outage or lose internet connection and can’t access vital files, or even something simple like a bad software update causing issues.

While a great option, one can’t simply spin up next cloud and then move everything over like you would a Saas solution as a typical layman.

If something goes wrong with your google account (or other SaaS that would lose your data, or ban you without recourse), you are not even on your own, you're just trully fucked. It's poof gone and no local/internet tech geek will be able to help you.

If something goes wrong with your at home nextcloud, you still have the data/hw, and you can either get help troubleshooting from someone who understands what they're doing, or you can try yourself (which will take more time). You're not on your own. And even if you are, you can just shelve it, and defer the recovery for later. But unless it figuratively crashed and literally burned, you're not fundamentally prevented from recovering your data.

Yeah totally agree with this. I back up all my important data, but I’d still prefer to Apple/Fastmail/Dropbox be the primary provider of a service and back it up to my server (and other cloud services) than run and rely on my own nextcloud.

In addition, backing up the services isn't that costly these days. Backblaze provides massive storage space at cheap rates and integrates well with encrypted backup software like Duplicity, Borg or Restic. Recovery from failure is usually a breeze with these software.

Running your own email server is a massive pain and horribly unreliable.

Could you approximately predict how many hours a month not very IT-knowledgeable person will spend trying to resolve different issues with this setup?

Someone needs to put together a single-click Docker-Compose-type solution that will work on any Digital-Ocean-type shared host.

Proton, Hetzner Nextcloud

Don't trust Hetzner. They will do the same.

Who won't?

There's no Proton Photos, as far as I am informed. Surprisingly, there is a Proton Calendar. But does it syncs with Calendly or Zoom, for example? I don't think so.

Currently more or less adequate solution in terms of integration is self-hosted Microsoft Exchange. I wonder how much does it cost (including Windows Server license).