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--- degoogling [2025/10/06 04:04] – write about working set, sync strategy qlyoung
+++ degoogling [2026/05/19 03:49] (current) – [Google Drive] qlyoung
@@ Line 3: / Line 3: @@
 Sometime around 2021 I began to feel that use of Google services constituted a grave threat to my digital sovereignty, and began slowly moving off of them.
-Here in 2024 I still have a Google account and probably will for the foreseeable future, because Google Fi and Google Fiber remain the best cell service and internet service providers, and you need a Google account to pay for them.
+Here in 2026 I still have a Google account and probably will for the foreseeable future, because Google Fi and Google Fiber remain the best cell service and internet service providers, and you need a Google account to pay for them.
 Today I use my Google account for five things:
   * As an OAuth identity for services that require one - literally just Tailscale, I have replaced everything else with email-based accounts
-  * Filling out Google Forms - please stop using these folks, they often require a Google account
+  * Filling out Google Forms
+    * If you use these, please set them so they don't require a Google account
   * Access to shared Google Photos albums
   * Google Fi (cell service)
   * Google Fiber (internet)
-Despite these limited use cases, which are all provided for free with a personal-tier Google account, I still have to pay for Google Suite ($8/month). Why? Because years ago when I wanted to use a custom domain on my Gmail account, I started paying for Google Suite to enable this functionality. When you do this, your Google account is converted from a "Personal" to a "Business" account. This is a one way transition. Once this happens, if you stop paying for it, your level of services drops *below* that offered to a free personal Google account. So unless I want to completely disable my Google account (spoilers: I do, but not yet) I have to continue to pay Google, because they don't offer a downgrade path.
+Despite these limited use cases, which are all provided for free with a personal-tier Google account, I still have to pay for Google Suite ($8/month). Why? Because years ago when I wanted to use a custom domain on my Gmail account, I started paying for Google Suite to enable this functionality. When you do this, your Google account is converted from a "Personal" to a "Business" account. This is a one way transition. Once this happens, if you stop paying for it, your level of services drops *below* that offered to a free personal Google account. So until I am ready to completely disable my Google account, I have to pay Google because they don't offer a downgrade path.
 Below I share what I have replaced various Google services with.
 ----
+===== Replacements =====
 ==== Gmail ====
@@ Line 25: / Line 28: @@
 ==== Search ====
-I now pay for [[https://kagi.com/|Kagi]].
+I pay for [[https://kagi.com/|Kagi]].
 ==== Google Drive ====
@@ Line 33: / Line 36: @@
 Tried and rejected:
-  * Filestash - kept running out of space on cloud VMs, software buggy
+  * [[https://www.filestash.app/|Filestash]] - kept running out of space on cloud VMs, S3 integration setup is a little scary, software buggy
-  * Nextcloud - too heavy to host a public instance just for filesharing
+  * [[https://nextcloud.com/|Nextcloud]] - I use this on my intranet, but it's too heavy to host a separate public instance just for filesharing
   * [[https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole|magic wormhole]] - works, but people don't want to install programs to receive files and the mobile story is bad. shout out [[https://rymdport.github.io/|rymdport]] for favorite client.
-  * [[https://syncthing.net/|Syncthing]] - It's a sync program, it isn't intended for unidirectional file transfer and thus doesn't work well for that purpose
+  * [[https://syncthing.net/|Syncthing]] - Sync programs are not designed for unidirectional file transfer and don't work well for that purpose
 I now pay for Dropbox. Upload to folder, share link. Sometimes you just gotta pay and move on.
@@ Line 49: / Line 52: @@
 There's other reasons, mostly to do with reliability engineering, but those are the main two.
-I think a lot of people - myself included - get fixated on the "single source of truth" paradigm. Files live in one big beautiful cluster that you can access from any device. I see the appeal. You can focus all your efforts making that cluster as big and beautiful as you want, as resilient as you want. But after spending lots of time building out a big beautiful cluster, I kept having the experience that I wanted some file and I just couldn't get to it. And when I could get to it the experience of browsing around, searching, transferring files all over a network just...sucks. After you buy into the paradigm, after a while you get used to it and forget that it doesn't have to be like that. It's totally possible to have all that data on a superfast SSD drive right next to your CPU, easily searchable and accessible at all times.
+TL;DR I now use [[tiered storage]]; what little need I have for internet-attached storage is now met by my home server, which has a lot of storage and is always accessible via tailscale. More on that in [[personal infrastructure]].
-I finally realized that I fundamentally hate network storage as a primary storage location. It requires a network and even when you have one it's just too slow. Shortly after that I looked at storage prices, and suddenly, it turns out that you can get huge amounts of storage for not a lot of money. Granted, it depends on the size of your frequently accessed data, which I term your "working set". For me that's photos, music, documents, and projects. For me, at today's storage unit prices, I can afford around 6-8tb of working set. That's a lot! My actual working set, the stuff I access on a regular basis, fits in that with a couple tb to spare.
-Yes, some things are just too big to store on device. At today's storage unit prices, storing 30tb of movies that you access once a year on your laptop doesn't make sense yet for most people. And for that, networked storage is fine - you rarely access those items.
-After assessing my current data distribution and doing some consolidation I established that 8tb could store all of my
-frequently accessed" files. This covers my music, photos, documents, and projects. It doesn't include stuff that falls in the bucket of "huge binary files" - movies, 300gb DNxHD Resolve projects, that sort of thing.
-Since it was about time for a new laptop anyway, I converted every computer I own to have at least 8tb of storage, consolidated my working set into a single directory, and synced it to all devices in one epic multi-day multi-terabyte sync session.
-I feel like I hit storage nirvana. I get on an airplane, spend a few hours editing a spreadsheet or something, close my laptop. By the time I get home all of that work has opportunistically synced to all my other computers and I can sit down at my desktop and open that file. It's amazing. I barely need to touch my big chungus pool.
 ==== Google Photos ====

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