Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arn_Thor | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed google, and used docs and sheets for budgeting and planning. Then one day it was all gone.

I'd had two google accounts, one created a decade ago on YouTube and later connected to my gmail-google account. I used the same login for both, and could switch between them without problem. I had used my Youtube-persona for most of my google docs work. That was all fine until suddenly I could only access docs from my other gmail-persona. They had without warning or reason changed either the account type or the app permissions for my account type. Not a word of warning, or even a message. There's no reverting it, no one at Google has been able to undo the change or recover my documents.

NEVER AGAIN will I trust any important information to any cloud company.

That was the day I started to take everything off the cloud and access it through a NAS at home (with off-site backup of course). I've never slept better

View on HN

While I'm a fan of self-hosting (I do it for email, contacts/calendar sync, RSS, etc), I'd say the problem there was a lack of backups, not the cloud service itself.

People think of backups as a way to protect themselves against hardware failure, but that's a reductive view; their purpose is to protect against systems failure, and a company is a single system. Sure they have their backups, but as you experienced, from the outside this is irrelevant - the system can fail as a whole, and therefore should be treated as a single copy.

Following the 3-2-1 rule, that might mean creating a second Google account with which you share all documents, and some process for backing up to outside Google (even if it's a regular manual use of Takeout).

Using a cloud service that can't be backed up is no different than trusting an hard drive not to fail.

Very valid point. I didn't think to use several google accounts. That might have solved my problem... Of course now I'm very diligently backing up everything anyway

I guess I'd be curious about how you deal with e-mail, since that was my negative experience with a cloud provider (Lavabit), and I think in-general e-mail is a much harder (and maybe inadvisable) service to self-host.

I always like to read experiences and opinions of people who lean one way or the other with regard to all this stuff, or are at least cognizant of it at all, since it seems 99% of people just use whatever they happen upon first and solves their problem.

I don't know if it's worth mentioning here, but i find one level of indirection enough. I have for the last n years paid for various email hosting providers (outsourcing the hassle of set-up, without going into the side discussion of how much hassle that is or not) but been able to switch effortlessly because i own my own domain. I've merely had to switch MX records when i wanted to switch, my emails are all still on my home computer (offlineimap, but i should really switch to whatever the kids these days are using) and my contacts were none the wiser.

Good question. I'm still stuck with Google for my personal mail, but I use an email client on my PC to download emails and archive them, and periodically do a full download of all my Google content. Not the easiest or most fun solution, but I found that hosting my own email would be a prohibitive amount of work.

The last thing keeping me on Google is a sheet scripted against calendar for budgeting. I can't find a good open source calendar with an API that will let me query for all events within a date range. Seems like the type of software that should exist in spades. I don't even really need a UI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com