Migrating from Google to E2EE services
This story starts like most people’s in this position, I recently decided to take better control of my data and attempt to move away from the big player in the cloud space.
^^ The big G in the flesh (G stands for whatever you want it to), credit to techengage for the pic
It’s probably not worth me going into the reasons on why this was important for me, as other people have explained it a lot better than I ever could, but in short, it helped me sleep better at night. As sad as that is :(
To be clear, this post isn’t a direct dig at Google overall. As I mention later on, their Google One offering is perfect for low-income families and individuals and they do, at least, appear to do a lot of good in the world. This is specifically a dig at their practices when it comes to handling data and my exit from them.
WARNING: This post is long, apologies for those with little time or attention span (don’t deny it, I know YOU are one of those people). If you just want a TLDR, head down to the Results section.
Beforehand
So, prior to this migration, I had my accounts and files spread across a variety of different accounts and providers. In short I had:
- 3 Google accounts:
- 1 “primary” one with a Google One 100GB subscription (which for £1.59/month is not too bad tbf), holding the majority of my emails and files (including photo albums).
- 1 “secondary” account that I used to sign up to dodgy or asshole services that wouldn’t accept a SimpleLogin alias >:( Some files from when I was a kid were abandoned in here too.
- 1 “break glass” account I only used as a backup for the other 2 and my proton account.
- SimpleLogin
- This held aliases for most of the accounts I used relatively often (great service btw).
- These aliases handled the forwarding of email from my online accounts to one of the 3 Google accounts.
- ProtonMail
- I only ever used this for “sensitive” services, which in my head translated to bank accounts and critical stuff like my password manager
Requirements
I was pretty hard on the requirements for a new email or drive provider, as I wanted something I wouldn’t need to touch for potentially years. Aside from the basic stuff (e.g. it needs to fucking work!), these were the main ones:
Doesn’t break the bank
I didn’t need a ton of storage or features, just something that took a few quid a month.
End-to-End Encryption (E2EE)
This goes for mail, files, contacts, calendar and basically any and all data that can be encrypted (I understand some stuff can’t, such as backup email addresses) out of prying provider eyes.
At least 200GB of cloud storage
I have a lot of shit I’ve collected archived over the year. I’d like to keep it that way.
A live sync client
Similar to the Google Drive app, I’d like the ability to sync my files in realtime. Uploading new versions manually gets very cringe very quick.
Additionally, it needed to have support for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android devices as these are the primary OS’s I use everyday (or will be migrating to very soon, see a future blog for that).
I know rclone is a decent compatibility service for most drive sync clients but I liked to have something that worked across the board if at all possible.
Easy migration of Google Photos
My photos have been meticulously organised over the years into around 50 albums. If I had to re-organise them again after a migration, I think I would die of boredom before I finished it.
The ability to share files/folders with external users
My parents and friends enjoy seeing my travelling escapades, it would be unfortunate to deprive them of my embarrassment.
Compatibility with ThunderBird
ThunderBird is great and has consistently been great for as long as I can remember. I don’t want to have to open my web browser or separate email application just to view an old calendar event or email on a legacy account.
Optionally, a way to import my data from gmail without fuss
It’s optional as I can just use ThunderBird to search for legacy stuff I need but it would be nice to have incase my google accounts get nuked.
Candidates
As you can imagine by the requirements, very few services actually fit the bill for me. Especially the support for Linux surprisingly. To make it simpler I searched for email and storage providers separately. Once I found one I liked the look of, I then looked into the crossover options for the service (email or storage) it was missing.
Email (which included calendar services) was, unsurprisingly, the easiest to fulfil as the amount of services out there that ticked all the boxes were quite low.
Some services beyond those mentioned here were also briefly considered but I scrapped the idea of using them very early on due to pricing reasons or incompatibility with my requirements.
Proton Mail
I was already using this so I knew how it operated and the multitude of protections and features it held. It is pretty cool that Proton Mail have achieved so much in so little time and their development teams are constantly cranking out new features.
Their pricing model was pretty reasonable and relatively easy to understand too (€176.37 for 24 months of Proton Unlimited, which included 500GB of email and file storage, VPN and password manager services). A lesser plan of Mail Plus was also suitable for my email needs too, alongside their import tool for gmail and google calendar.
I initially thought you could have the Drive Plus and Mail Plus plans at the same time, which would have been perfect as I didn’t need a VPN or password manager. It also worked out cheaper (€83.76 for 24 months per service). This wasn’t the case though, you can only have one of each and the alternative is to upgrade to the Unlimited plan. Smooth brain perhaps, but Proton did not make it very clear this was the case at the time.
Tutanota
Tutanota was a relatively old player on the scene and yet, one I hadn’t heard of until I started looking around for gmail alternatives. It’s pricing and privacy models seemed decent and although it lacked integrated file storage supported (unlike Proton), it did seem to have a passionate community (local knowledge is best!).
However, I did notice early on that it did not support any integration with ThunderBird. Booooo!
FastMail
An even older player than Tutanota, FastMail was an email provider I had heard of but hadn’t initially considered to have E2EE support. Some redditors commented that it did not but I only found evidence of this being true in FastMail’s privacy policy. Sad times :’(
On the other hand though, if I was ok with scrapping the E2EE requirement, it was very cheap for what they offered (€114 for 24 months), had a tool for migrating from gmail and included ThunderBird support. Tempting…
Storage
As for storage providers, a lot more digging was required as it seemed like all the services I looked at seemed seriously break one of my requirements in one way or another. I looked at 20+ services but these were the ones I had narrowed down to.
Proton Drive
Proton recently (as in September 2022), released Proton Drive, a google drive like application that permitted the sync and storage of files in E2EE format in the cloud. It offered integration with mails, google photos albums, as well as support for most of my required OS’s (barring Linux without a questionable rclone plugin for now).
While half-baked, it did satisfy most of my requirements in the end.
Filen
Filen was strictly an E2EE storage service, with no email or calendar support. That being said, they appeared to do this very well and did not miss on any requirements.
The only issue I noticed early on was that they were very new (formed in 2020), so there was always the risk they may implode in the near future.
Tresorit
Tresorit appeared to be king of the privacy-focused storage services, most articles I read regarding E2EE cloud storage for individuals seemed to mention it at least once. For seemingly good reason too, they appeared very impressive and supported all the necessary OS’s.
However, it did lack any cheaper tiers for personal accounts (£191.76 for 24 months of 1TB storage, almost overkill for me) and enforced a hard 10GB maximum file size limit. The file size limit was a pain for me as I have several zipped archives in excess of 30GB (I know I know, you don’t need to tell me how suboptimal that is).
OwnCloud
I looked into OwnCloud a while back when I considered self-hosting over the cloud for storage but I underused it due to the worries and overhead of self-hosting important data. What I didn’t look into at the time though, was their cloud offerings.
E2EE, 500GB of storage for multiple users, support for basically everything, sounds great!
The catch? €360 for 24 months. Yikes!
NordLocker
Unlucky for me (but lucky for you), I am not sponsored by Nord and can say whatever I want about them. Even in a YouTube video, assuming that I ever become a depraved YouTuber.
NordLocker (their cloud storage service) cost £28.68/year (£2.39/month) for 500GB on all the OS’s I need. While cheap, it had no photos or Linux support however.
sync.com
If Tresorit was overkill for storage space and pricing plans, sync.com was a lot worse. $192 ($8/month) for 2TB for 24 months. While E2EE and and granular permissions were there, no Linux support (as is common in this category) was a big failing.
ente
A bit of an honourable mention for those simply interesting in E2EE photo and video storage, ente seemed like a great offering for those moving from icloud, google photos and the like. Including an import tool, £30/year for 50GB and support on most OS’s, ente seemed great other than the lack of support for other file types too.
Results
In the end, I went with:
- Proton Mail Plus for email
- Filen for file and photo cloud storage
While I did try out Proton Unlimited for a few days, some of it’s missing features and support was letting it down a bit despite the large amount of storage and custom domain names on offer. Maybe when it’s in a better state and I require a new VPN service, I’ll upgrade to Unlimited. For now though, the Mail Plus plan serves my needs just fine.
With the migration complete, the layout of my email accounts more or less remains the same as above, with some minor differences. Proton Mail aliases replaced each google account, which helped keep my inboxes organised and helped me work out if I cared about an account or not. This also helped make the migration easier and allowed for me to nuke the break-glass account in the end. I’ve started using YubiKeys and time-based one-time passwords (TOTPs) for recovery anyways, so a break-glass account wasn’t really useful to me.
Admittedly, it’s not perfect. I didn’t realise you could only delete 1 email alias a year on Proton Mail, which means I have 5 spare ones (as I had played around with them before) instead of the starting 10. This was somewhat annoying as it meant I was stuck with the poorly named aliases I created during the migration as opposed to simply deleting them and creating new ones.
Bridge, while useful, did take some work to setup properly with Thunderbird when you have multiple aliases in SimpleLogin and Proton Mail. The problem was I wasn’t seeing any email from my Proton Mail aliases in ThunderBird for some reason, despite them being present in my ProtonMail inbox. For those with the same issue, it turned out I needed to use split mode, wait for it to synchronise with Proton Mail’s server and then add the additional aliases in Thunderbird as separate email accounts.
Regarding cloud storage, Filen was excellent. While I knew the risk of implosion was higher than some of the other providers I looked into, they brought a lot to the table for a low price, which I hoped would keep them going long into the future.
A small setup overhead, photo and file migration, multi-platform support and an affordable plan meant that they were an instant yes for me. It also helped prevent me from putting all my eggs in one basket, since SimpleLogin is heavily influenced/owned by Proton.
Looking at all this one a purely on a financial basis, it was a poor decision. Google One was costing me £1.59/month (£38.16 for 24 months of 100GB mail and storage), where I am now paying:
- €83.76 every 24 months for Proton Mail Plus
- €30 every 12 months for SimpleLogin Premium
- €19.99 every 12 months for Pro 1 of Filen
For a total of €133.75 every 24 months (or about €5.58 a month).
But, on a security, privacy and compatibility front, it’s leaps and bounds ahead. I’m happy spending a bit more money each month for that. Hell, beer probably costs me more than that each month, so I don’t really have a right to complain :)
Future
So yeah, that’s the ted-talk of my migration away from google. Sorry it was so long, I basically just dumped my thoughts on this while on a train.
I’m going to keep my old gmail accounts alive for now, since I haven’t fully completed moving everything over to SimpleLogin. New accounts will continue to be created using SimpleLogin in the future so the long term intention is to nuke all my gmail accounts, leaving me completely out of Google’s sphere.
I also want to setup my own domain for emails too, in the event Proton gets nuked. That’ll probably be a longer term thing though, as it would require some thought around the flow between the web account, SimpleLogin and Proton Mail.