Everyone saying "I would lose all my e-mail" apparently doesn't know about fetchmail, getmail or even Thunderbird. Just download your mail using IMAP or POP3 and archive it locally.
I recently deleted my last Gmail account (that I had since 2001). Before doing it, I tried Google's Checkout to get the data, but it was adking me for "verification" (i.e. more info about me) to finish the download.
I just fired up Thunderbird, configured a IMAP account and... done. Almost 20 years of e-mais are now backed up at home and on a Nextcloud instance I keep on a Linode VPS.
Web is not the only way to read e-mails, friends. Use a proper client and back it up.
You can also schedule Google Takeout, which gives you a nice .zip or .tgz with mbox files, in addition to all of your other Google information. I have it set to deliver one of these backups every two months automatically.
How would you do google checkout once they have banned your account with no access ? Even if you have done it majority of people suffering from this fate will not have google checkout data or access to it !
True. But I was replying to a comment which mentioned using IMAP sync as a backup; both that solution and Google Takeout require access to your account.
does this include absolutely everything from your Google account, like all emails with attachments, google photos with album data, youtube videos from your channel, etc? If not, does someone know of a guide out there on how to export all of one's data from Google?
Yes. I can verify that it contains email attachments, Google Photos files (along with metadata in JSON format), and YouTube videos. There is quite a bit of other information included as well, some of which I didn't even know I had created.
That's actually amazing. thanks for your response! I've been slowly working on detaching from google this year due to stories like this, but the thought of manually downloading all my data was rather overwhelming. Glad to know they at least offer this feature
> ...backed up at home and on a Nextcloud instance I keep on a Linode VPS.
> Web is not the only way to read e-mails, friends. Use a proper client and back it up.
I think your advice is good for you and, perhaps, for some of us who are willing to do the work.
But the vast majority of people aren't going to be able to casually fire up, for example, a Nextcloud instance and linode VPS. Not even close.
The long-term management of a DIY personal/household computing infrastructure for email, important files, and online services just isn't in the skill-set of most people who aren't computing professionals. It's not really even in the skill-set of most computing professionals.
I just used Google Checkout to get my music files after Google shutdown the play music service and transferred it to youtube music. I now have ~60GB of zips containing mp3's and meta-data in csv files (admittedly, it was all badly curated by me with garbage id3's and bad filenames). I'm now trying to properly tag and curate these media files and host it in some way that I can use it remotely. It's not a trivial job. Especially because I've decided I don't want surveillance capitalism coming between my music collection and me anymore (eg no spotify/pandora/apple-music for me). I'm sure it's trivial work for some of you but for me to manage a collection of music, it's a challenging project with lots of trial and error (tbh, I kind of enjoy it). Can everyone do this? Definitely not. It's a massive DIY undertaking.
If we're now talking about email and files which are more important that one's cool music collection, it's a whole other ball game. I don't think there's a good solution for those of us who don't want to roll-our-own infrastructure.
> I'm now trying to properly tag and curate these media files and host it in some way that I can use it remotely. It's not a trivial job.
Foobar2000 with discogs addon will help you with organization; musicbrainz picard will hello you with actually identifying your files if necessary. Airsonic is quite nice for actual hosting, and allows you to create multiple accounts with limited access and time-limited shares for playlists/albums/etc. I personally use fb2k with a dozen or so addons to organize my media library and playlists (the auto-playlists feature is nice). I use airsonic for hosting; on computers I use the web interface (or fb2k) for playback; on mobile I use dsub for playback. Bubbleupnp server is also installed locally so I can share/cast to receivers that don't support subsonic protocol, though I have yet to use this since I started using airsonic.
Airsonic is a fork(?) of subsonic, and has several forks available with different feature-sets and focuses (one for japanese media, one for audiobooks, etc). The one I use is airsonic-advanced, linked below. It integrates with last.fm and listenbrainz for scrobbling, and (I think) with last.fm for artist info and similar artists (I'd like to see similar artists replaced by gnod, personally).
I feel silly for not having thought of this. Thanks for the suggestion. Just setup Thunderbird and i'm downloading my emails now using the offline sync feature. Appreciate the advice!
I recently deleted my last Gmail account (that I had since 2001). Before doing it, I tried Google's Checkout to get the data, but it was adking me for "verification" (i.e. more info about me) to finish the download.
I just fired up Thunderbird, configured a IMAP account and... done. Almost 20 years of e-mais are now backed up at home and on a Nextcloud instance I keep on a Linode VPS.
Web is not the only way to read e-mails, friends. Use a proper client and back it up.