Migrating my life out of Google's data silos

Data ownership is a lot like homeownership; it's much more stressful than renting, but you actually control the floor plan. After two years of slowly untangling my digital life from Google, I finally finished the hardest part: moving my entire photo library. I didn't just click a "move" button; I had to treat it like a migration project because Google's ecosystem is designed to make leaving as frictionless—and as difficult—as possible.

The catalyst was their pricing logic. I fell into a trap where a Google One plan bundled AI features I didn't ask for, and their UI makes it a nightmare to downgrade to a basic storage tier. It felt less like a service and more like being stuck in a subscription loop. To get my memories out without losing the underlying file integrity, I used Google Takeout and then wrote a custom script to ensure the metadata stayed intact during the transfer to Apple Photos. If you mess up the metadata during a migration, it's like moving houses and finding out all your labeled boxes were swapped; everything looks right on the surface, but nothing is where it should be.

For actual data durability, I couldn't just trust a single cloud provider. I've been using Backblaze for years, but for this specific library, I implemented a redundancy layer using Borgmatic to sync everything to BorgBase. It’s a bit more overhead, but it provides the kind of granular control you don't get when you're just a tenant in someone else's database.

My current stack is much more intentional now. I’ve stripped away the bloat, though I'm keeping a close eye on Apple to see if they start forcing unrequested AI features into Mail. The only "tax" I still pay is for YouTube Premium. At this point, the cost is a small price to pay to avoid the friction of junk ads on my smart TV. Fighting a poorly designed UI just to watch a video isn't a good use of time, and sometimes paying for a clean interface is just more efficient.

The tools I used for the heavy lifting:

https://takeout.google.com
https://www.backblaze.com
https://www.borgbase.com