Dec 29, 2025

I’m continuing my exodus from greedy (also free and privacy-preserving) Google infrastructure for my personal files. So far, I’ve got a nice 4 TB SSD drive and repurposed an old 4 TB HDD to set up Immich with a backup through Syncthing. I also set up another Syncthing folder to backup Google Drive from my laptop (which runs Google Drive client to download all files). It’s fine so far, except that few random photos got their creation date in a far-far future, so they show up at the top. On a related note, Paul Baecher published Incremental backups of Gmail takeouts. I asked him if he automated downloads from the Takeout, and he suggested trying an option to pull email backups through Google Drive, which has a proper client. That would require having enough space in Google Drive to store all emails, of course. For uninititated, last year Google added authentication for downloading from the takeout links, so I can’t use wget in a shell script on the server. Currently, I download the archive to my laptop and then scp it to the server, which is extremely lame.