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I’m leaving Google. Dropbox, One Drive, and others.

I left Google!

Well, great clickbate. It’s nothing against google per se. But I left many free-ish services.

image of google, let me finish my phrase
Google let me finish my phrase

List:

  1. Dropbox.
  2. OneDrive.
  3. Google Drive.
  4. Gmail.
  5. etc.

You get the drift; great services were serving a purpose but… eh, more info below.

Dropbox / One Drive / Google Drive:

All this is great if you are moving pet pictures around and you’re a home user. But usually, nothing comes for free unless you already have given resources. And lately, I realized after using owncloud; I was no longer using these services. (Owncloud replaced all of them and placed them in the garbage).

Owncloud gives me phone sync, offline access, and, better yet, cross-platform. I have it hooked up to a glusterfs backend storage with around 6 TB of usable storage in raid one style (Raid 1 on Gluster, Physical raid one on the machine).

So the odds of 100% data loss are pretty slim, given that I also perform a weekly full backup and a daily differential to another set of clustered drives.

In short, I get pretty much free 6 TB storage, which I can share, etc., and better yet… I know where it’s stored and how secure it is. Not saying these services weren’t reliable but who the heck knows where those bits were stored.

Gmail:

I’ve been using Gmail pretty much since it first saw the light; it’s been a great ride, but as lovely as it is. Besides a pretty easy UI, I wasn’t giving much more than I can already get with my servers. It was pretty much me doing them a favor than the other way.

But oh man, the ads had me tired. Then I decided to start signing my Emails with PGP, encrypting some of them with the people I talk to… but hey, no support on the web client. So it was about time. I left it altogether, dropped it.

Is it for everyone? No, is it for me? Yes!

In short, I’m planning on finding free as in beer equivalents to many of the services I use online for private solutions. In all honesty, I do them a favor by not having to store my wife’s cat pictures.

THE PAIN:

Moving forward with this idea made me realize many services depend on Email as an identifier. Unfortunately, this is horrible for many reasons; mainly, if you ever change it, you’re doomed! So, for now, it’s going to be a forward to my new address and hope for the best.

Finally… this picture will explain it all:

Thank you for all these years… till you turned evil.
ddemuro
administrator

Sr. Software Engineer with over 10 years of experience. Hobbist photographer and mechanic. Tinkering soul in an endeavor to better understand this world. Love traveling, drinking coffee, and investments.

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