On The Path of De-Googling
I have embarked on a new journey to extricate myself from the grips of Google on my life. We all know they are taking every bit of information they gather from you using their apps and are selling it and I'm over being part of that.
I have decided (partially due to this Linus Tech Tips video) to begin shifting away from Google run services to ones that value privacy in addition to security, even if it means spending some money on a subscription. Most of the software that is the most impactful in my life - Bitwarden, NordVPN, etc - are ones I pay a meager subscription for because it's worth it for the most part.
Proton Mail and it's associated other Google-like services are where we are moving. Currently I am using the free tier, but see myself subscribing soon if only to be able to use my own domain and utilize IMAP features for archiving emails externally with Paperless-ngx (I wrote about setting here). The apps work great and I really do like the idea of my most personal pieces of information being thoroughly encrypted so only I can access them. I have migrated my Email and Calendar to Proton at this point, though I still need to migrate my email on all my accounts. I expect this transition to be one that takes a while and will very much happen service by service.
I am going to tackle Email and Calendar stuff first, migrate accounts and such to the new email address, and then possibly branch out to further services Proton offers such as Photo Backup. On that subject in particular I haven't decided if I want to self host that particular solution or let a service do the work.
As of now I won't be able to migrate away from Google Drive because I use it as my server backup storage location, but if Duplicati gains support for Proton Drive I will likely be all in on switching over.
In any case I am excited about the prospects here and may write some updates in the future on how the switch is going and any pain points I've run into. So far everything has run pretty smoothly it's just going to be a lost of tedious work!
Until next time.