I have content on Google and Dropbox but I have live backups. It would be very annoying to be locked out of Google, but I would not lose any data. Anyone can have a NAS, you don't need a while basement or to live inside of one (??!?)
Yes, those companies should absolutely be forbidden to behave like this, and punished heavily when they do. But until it happens (which doesn't look like it will), your data is your responsibility.
You lose the Google content , since the export is lossy (docs , sheets, slides , etc) . And most of the value is collaborative . You’ll lose anything that you contribute to that’s not in your account . You’ll lose credentials (eg sso to third parties ), messaging access .
You’ll lose indexing and metadata , like Google Drive search , Google Photos search , thumbnails .
It’s a myth to assume the value is in the backup. Most of the value you have is in the access and the application
I don't have anything serious on Google drive, just some files I share with third parties that primarily exist on my network; and certainly no photos. Photos are on my NAS which is backed up on several disks; I publish them on a small app that I built, self-hosted (after years with Smugmug I left them two years ago).
Most accounts with third parties use domains I own that are not on Google in any way. Some still use a gmail address and I need to migrate those. But nothing essential.
That’s helpful context . How do you collaborate ? For example when a customer or partner sends a Google Drive / Dropbox folder for you to contribute to ?
You can run rclone every couple minutes on your NAS, it checks mtimes like rsync so it is reasonably efficient for most cases, though you may run into ratelimits with bigger data.
Google Photos deliberately broke all backup tools in March, so there's that.
Yes you can still mostly do Takeout, but it's garbage. (not incremental. Requires me to remember. duplicates files for every album (total incompetence). downloads regularly fail. Requires more room than I have on my mac to decompress so I have to put it on an external drive.)
Yes, those companies should absolutely be forbidden to behave like this, and punished heavily when they do. But until it happens (which doesn't look like it will), your data is your responsibility.