Google Photos users: What will you do if your Google account is banned?
So I've been thinking about this for a while and diversifying services as much as possible (mail, drive, docs etc) but Photos is one service that I can't replace.
Of course I take backups of the (super messy) Takeout, and use the API to make (incomplete, lower quality) backups of photos.
None are ideal though. So, here's my question, what's your contingency plan if you lose access to your Google account?
I asked myself the same. My conclusion was "don't use Google Photos".
I know it's probably the best service out there and it's hard to replace. But it's not worth the risk.
You say you can't replace it. Why is that? Maybe there are some alternatives that you don't know about?
Probably be slightly annoyed for a day, then... nothing, since I have a local copy of all my data.
I actually started a wiki page[1] about how to backup data (automatically) from Google services when this scary article[2] hit here on HN, if anyone knows any other tools that could be helpful, please let me know.
Back to the topic: you can use https://rclone.org to do it for you.
I have it setup to run automatically every night, that way you can still use Google Photos (because it's just really well done) while still sleeping peacefully knowing that you always have a local copy.
[1] https://wiki.emilburzo.com/backing-up-your-google-digital-li...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12972554
To me the more likely problem is Google sunsetting the service and/or migrating it to something that doesn’t do the same things. Because probably at some point Google will have extracted all the business value from the old photos and they will just be dead weight on its servers and switches. More importantly all those pictures are a legal liability because of copyright violations and pornography. This is the ordinary fate of all picture hosting services in general and Google in particular has a track record of shuttering services low revenue services after a few years.
Just my personal opinion. Don’t use Google Services for “critical” use cases like storing personal photos. If they have the ability to ban/ shutdown your Google Account without recourse, I wouldn’t be using their services for anything other than searches, junk mail account for newsletters. There are plenty of companies out there with very reliable products that serve customers with respect for a tiny fee.
I would write a blog post about it and hopefully reach the HN frontpage so someone from Google can do something about it.
I don't use Google photos anymore, largely for this concern. But when I did, I shared my albums with someone else in the unlikely event of this happening.
I periodically download photos to my external HDD.
Could you expand on why a weekly/monthly Takeout backup is not ideal?
Buy an external hard drive and put your photos there from now on.