I moved my backups off of Google servers.
Many months ago, April 2024, Google fired workers protesting Project Nimbus, a Google-Amazon-Israel project, during an intense period of the Gaza Genocide. This suggested that Google Cloud Services, the part of Google that works with outside-of-Google programmers to use Google's services, had fired a lot of competent people—I figure that most of the Googlers still there didn't think they could find work elsewhere and thus had been scared to protest.
Google isn't a monolith; just because Google Cloud Services was messing up doesn't mean all of Google was falling apart. But I knew that my backups used Google Cloud; my reliable backups didn't feel so reliable anymore.
It took me a few months to move my backups.
Well, it took me a few months to fail to move my backups the hard way; then almost
no time to move them the easy way.
I wasted a lot of time trying to keep my scheme mostly the same, just
storing stuff on someone else's storage. I liked my custom-made system,
and to keep things simple I wanted to keep using it instead of learning
some new-to-me system… But eventually I realized I was putting a
lot of effort into failing to figure out how to keep my "simple"
system going without Google cloud storage. Learning one of these new
not-so-new anymore systems was pretty easy by comparison.
(I was using rclone mount, and thought I had a lot of choices about where to store my files; a lot of places support rclone! But when I looked more closely, I found out almost all those places support rclone mostly—they support it except the mount feature.)
Once I had my backups flowing to the new place, I didn't delete my old backups from Google right away. I had an annual subscription; so it seemed worthwhile to leave the files up there for a few months while I made sure that my new backups were working OK. That finally happened, so I finally canceled. That little task just took me nine months.
