News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google fl... by ISL on Sunday August 21, 2022 @08:20AM (#32539438)
One solution to many of these concerns is a periodic backup (via Takeout) of your Google account.
Re:A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google fl... by Aeolun on Sunday August 21, 2022 @08:35PM (#32545948)
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…

Re:A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google fl... by mceachen on Monday August 22, 2022 @01:11AM (#32547600)
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).

Re:A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google fl... by radicality on Sunday August 21, 2022 @09:56PM (#32546476)
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.
Re:A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google fl... by djbusby on Sunday August 21, 2022 @08:40PM (#32545969)
I've been getting mine as a large-ish (16GiB) TGZ type file for many years.
Re:A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google fl... by anon291 on Sunday August 21, 2022 @10:39AM (#32540631)
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.
Re:A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google fl... by kornhole on Sunday August 21, 2022 @11:11AM (#32540942)
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.
Re:A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google fl... by anon291 on Monday August 22, 2022 @09:37AM (#32551170)
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.

Re:A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google fl... by sillystuff on Sunday August 21, 2022 @08:59PM (#32546109)
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.

Re:A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google fl... by anon291 on Monday August 22, 2022 @09:38AM (#32551179)
Why do you need root? How is google and all able to do it with their apps?
Re:A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google fl... by inportb on Sunday August 21, 2022 @10:49AM (#32540734)
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...
Re:A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google fl... by koheripbal on Monday August 22, 2022 @09:45AM (#32551272)
This is not a "solution" - it just mitigates a portion of the disruption.
Re:A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google fl... by tsimionescu on Monday August 22, 2022 @05:12AM (#32549092)
How does that help you get access to sites that you secured with Google MFA that you are now locked out of?
Re:A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google fl... by hosteur on Sunday August 21, 2022 @08:39AM (#32539558)
How do you automate this for daily backups?
Re:A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google fl... by MarchKilroy89 on Sunday August 21, 2022 @10:40AM (#32540644)
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.
Re:A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google fl... by ISL on Sunday August 21, 2022 @03:18PM (#32543471)
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.