Ask HN: Are you backing up your Google account? If so, how?

23 points·Calvin02··5 comments

From Gmail, GDocs, to Gdrive, I’m very dependent on Google. I know Google isn’t going anywhere but things happen or accounts get disabled.

What’s your contingency plan?

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If you're not aware of Google Takeout[0] I highly recommend looking into it. I take regular backups of my entire account, and persist them on a personal server (which has its own layers of replication.) This may not be the contingency plan you mean, but I've found it to be one useful piece of that puzzle.

[0] https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

This is IMO the best option. Just wondering, do you automate the process, or you simply take a backup once in a while?

And for OP: the MBOX file format used for Mail works well in Mozilla Thunderbird using this addon ( https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/importexporttoo... ), if you need something to visualize its content easily.

Not using Google is my method for reducing impact.

Even just moving your "root" email off of Google into something like ProtonMail or FastMail would be better.

I use MS outlook, setup it to download everything, and backing up the database. Also helps when migrating data to a new PC.

I use rclone to sync my drive to backblaze b2 daily. This runs in my personal cluster as a CronJob. The initial egress cost was steep but i’m not generating 100s of GB a month.

I download takeouts once a month and store them in drive to cover the other google data.

I have bucket versioning in b2 and only delete items manually every now and then.

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