The Road to Data Independence is a Pain

I should post more when I'm sitting around doing fuck-all! That just popped into my head.

Anyway, I've seen a lot of stories on the Reddit machine lately of people losing access to their Google accounts for bullshit reasons to do with content of their private photos. Which made me suddenly realize that oh fuck, I have my entire life on Google and no backups. So here we go.

Anyway, I bought a cheap little SSD NAS to put all my Google Drive and Photos shit on. I have about 1.5TB of data, so I figure a 4 drive 8 TB setup is fine for a couple years - 4TB of mirrored shit.

I have been 100% unable to download everything from Google Takeout. It is absurdly impossible. I have tried every which possible way. I just finally bought a Dropbox and I think I can transfer to that and then sync from there. I think. The problem is, I don't have 1.5 TB of data. A massive fuck tonne of that was done from various Google Pixel/Nexus phones over the years that had whatever various agreements they had. Anyway, when I try to download everything it looks like I have 7TB of data. 7TB of data is gottdamn expensive. 7TB is data is real annoying to download. 7TB of data also isn't going to tit on that fucking NAS.

So there I was, buying an additional drive to bounce shit onto. 5TB drive and 4TB NAS seems a good start ... I thought. But maybe not. Like, what am I going to keep where? So I bought another 5TB drive thinking I could put the Google Drive data on the NAS and the missus and I can each have a drive for our photos. Except once I finally get the photos downloaded they are all in 50GB zip files and I don't have enough space to unzip the holy fucking pain in the ass files. Do I sound frustrated yet?

That's where I'm at right now. What should I do? I think I am going to keep the Google Drive files on the SSD NAS. That is under a TB of data. I'll set that shit up and get Paperless-NGX running. Maybe a Nextcloud instance? But the photos? I don't know what to do. I need to get them downloaded so I can feel safe. That should take a couple of weeks and then I'll have like 100 zips to deal with. Right now, I'm thinking I'll get another NAS? This one will be spinny rust for now. I just need a way to make the photos accessible. Maybe a 4 bay, buy 2 20ish TB drives. Get the photos all unarchived and maybe do something with Immich? I dunno.....

Anyway, wow what a pain! Especially considering I have no idea what I'm going. I'm just learning and rolling with the punches. I would like to be done buying shit. This is getting a bit expensive.