Celebrating my digital independence: My journey from Google's ecosystem to embracing alternatives; regaining control over my email, files, and photos.
The Early Days: Embracing Gmail and Google Workspace
Nearly two decades ago, in 2004, I 'joined' the Gmail Beta program, an exclusive opportunity I seized for a fiver on eBay. Google's offer of 1GB of inbox space was groundbreaking compared to other email hosts at the time. Bye-Bye hotmail 😬.
Back then, the internet landscape was very different – arguably less secure, but that's a matter of perspective.
Fast-forward to 2006: Google launched Apps for Business, and I was an early adopter whilst trying to (unsuccessfully) establish a web hosting company. I enjoyed a few free accounts for years until this service was phased out in May 2022. By then, Google was offering "Unlimited" storage for GSuite Business Accounts, and many took advantage (see r/DataHoarder). GSuite became an all-encompassing storage solution for anything from Video Production to, home-media servers running their own private Plex server.
The Shift: From Workspaces to Google One
However, the landscape shifted in 2021/22. GSuite rebranded to Workspaces, introducing a 2TB limit per user. The era of the Google Data Hoarder ended. In 2023, facing these limitations, I transitioned from Workspaces to Google One, and moved a lot of storage locally to unRAID. This move wasn't without challenges, especially when transferring ownership of hundreds of GSheets, GDocs, and GSlides from a Team Drive within Workspace to a personal account. The process was cumbersome, requiring manual exports to traditional file formats.
This experience was a wake-up call about the nature of the digital tools I had relied on.
Google is like a garden wall that, you've been happily planting against for years, only to realise that it's actually a vine-covered labyrinth, designed not just to keep your plants in, but to make sure they never find their way out!
Rekindling with Dropbox
Dropbox has been a staple in my digital toolkit since 2006, serving as my go-to for file storage. It supported me through university and was instrumental in the success of my digital agency for several years. The only reason I ever shifted some storage away from it was due to performance issues, but overall, it's a robust product that consistently delivers.
In December 2023, I made the decision to migrate most of my storage back to Dropbox from Google One. The improvement in Dropbox's block-level sync is a game changer from previous iterations, although I'm keeping a watchful eye on their ongoing integration of AI.😔☢️
The move back to Dropbox feels like a reunion with my files. Another factor that nudged me away from Google was their 2019 decision to split Google Drive and Google Photos. With Dropbox, I regain control over my photo storage, organizing it just the way I like; into folders. 👍
Embracing Proton: A Leap Towards Digital Privacy
Since the launch of Proton Mail in 2017, Proton has evolved from offering just encrypted email to championing absolute digital privacy. The internet landscape of today is vastly different from that of 2004. It might be more "secure," but it's also rife with cyber incidents, pervasive ads, ubiquitous trackers, and the ever-annoying cookie banner. Proton has responded to these challenges by expanding its suite of products to include password management, VPN, and email services.
My decision to leave Google Workspace required finding suitable replacements for several services: an email provider for my own domains, a VPN alternative to Google One, and a more modern solution to replace my 12-year-old password manager, Keepass2. This need led me to explore what Proton had to offer.
Here's what I accomplished within just a few hours of signing up with Proton:
- Configured a Proton Unlimited account, complete with DMARC-secured custom domains email.
- Consolidated all my email accounts into one shared inbox, setting up efficient filters, labels, and folders.
- Established anonymous email forwarding from Gmail to my new Proton inbox.
- Seamlessly migrated 20 years' worth of emails, attachments, and labels with just a few clicks in Proton's settings.
- Took the opportunity to declutter, finally deleting those 10-year-old PayPal receipts 😆.
- Migrated Keepass into ProtonPass.
- Configured VPN across my devices.
I did run into a snag with battery usage in the Proton Mail Android app, but Proton's support team was quick to help me resolve the issue.
Eyeing Proton Drive for the Future
Looking ahead, I look forward to seeing a more mature Proton Drive, with more competitive storage options, and features for photo storage. There's also the matter of the SOLID project, https://solidproject.org/about. I wonder if Proton's open sourced approach can offer any potential development of secure distributed storage pods.