First post, might as well be a cautionary tale. My father, a pretty old programmer by anyone's standards, regularly warns me of this sort of thing. He was pretty much shafted by CompuServe many years ago on a miniscule scale compared to what is possible now. He lives his life in what I previously described as a paranoid bubble of data control.
Until I inevitably burned myself with Google. I have no idea what happened but my account was terminated suddenly. No warning and no explanation as my backup address was no longer valid. This was two years ago. I lost documents, account details, contacts, calendars, email history, conversations between people on hangouts plus my phone decided to ask me to sign in again and became as useless as a dumbphone instantly.
Took about a month to reorganise my life and I lost contact with people, failed to complete tasks because my record was gone, lost control over my personal finances which were in Google sheets. Probably burned a week of my life on this as well.
Now using a cheap Nokia 106, POP3 box with gandi.net, mozilla Firefox and lightning, encrypted USB sticks for backup and LibreOffice. Never been happier.
I am genuinely afraid of going through this again. Everything remains portable between OS and provider now. Things are more volatile than we realise. I understand my father now.
I'm not against using all in services like Google but you need backups, an exit plan and a DR strategy explaining where all the services will go plus the time to carry it out. If you don't have these or it's too expensive to do this even for a personal user, don't even cross the starting line with the product.
Edit: Also beware of potential mergers, political whim and products being redacted or broken for long periods of time. All of these have affected me over the years.
Until I inevitably burned myself with Google. I have no idea what happened but my account was terminated suddenly. No warning and no explanation as my backup address was no longer valid. This was two years ago. I lost documents, account details, contacts, calendars, email history, conversations between people on hangouts plus my phone decided to ask me to sign in again and became as useless as a dumbphone instantly.
Took about a month to reorganise my life and I lost contact with people, failed to complete tasks because my record was gone, lost control over my personal finances which were in Google sheets. Probably burned a week of my life on this as well.
Now using a cheap Nokia 106, POP3 box with gandi.net, mozilla Firefox and lightning, encrypted USB sticks for backup and LibreOffice. Never been happier.
I am genuinely afraid of going through this again. Everything remains portable between OS and provider now. Things are more volatile than we realise. I understand my father now.
I'm not against using all in services like Google but you need backups, an exit plan and a DR strategy explaining where all the services will go plus the time to carry it out. If you don't have these or it's too expensive to do this even for a personal user, don't even cross the starting line with the product.
Edit: Also beware of potential mergers, political whim and products being redacted or broken for long periods of time. All of these have affected me over the years.