We all got ourselves stuck in the quicksand of the Google suite of products because of the original convenience benefits of linked services working together in fairly smart ways. I remember the enjoyment of seeing location metadata embedded into my photos so that I could see a cool 'journey' of my holidays as I trekked between cities. Being able to set reminders & tasks based on specific sentences in my Gmail emails seemed sensible enough. But over time we've all felt the creep factor increase more and more. With the huge amount of information captured from mobile phones over the last decade or so, the data collection ecosystem has gone into overdrive.

For many people I know, the penny drop moment often came from the serving of ads that went a bit too far. It was usually about seeing ads on a laptop or desktop, after discussing it earlier that day while their mobile phone was in earshot. That lightbulb moment people often get is the realisation that Google (and other big tech companies) are always listening. It was the initial reason behind why I wanted to de-Google my life – I wanted to simultaneously stop being treated as a consumer (which is how Google makes their money off me) and I wanted more control over my digital identity more generally.

My goals have shifted over time as well; I'm now keen to break away from all of the (mostly US-based) large commercial technology companies, as companies such as Meta, X, Spotify, Microsoft, Amazon & others seem to act in the same way as Google.

My current de-Googling status

I've been slowly de-Googling my life for two and a half years now, starting with the migration of my personal email account in late 2023. I would recommend it as the best place to start, since a lot of accounts tend to stem from your email address and I think migrating your email address is a gradual change; it isn't something you can finish in an afternoon.

Before getting into what I've done so far, I'll mention that it's always surprising to see the range of products you need to adopt if you want to break away from Google. Google ties in a huge number of services to one single account and the convenience & simplicity of an all-in-one service is really tough to overcome.

But if you're reading this, you're already intrigued by the idea of not letting the Big G have a monopoly over your digital identity and you're tempted by the ability to take action.

With that all said, here are the list of actions I've taken to remove myself from Google's ecosystem to date:

• migrated emails from Gmail to Proton Mail (here's my personal Proton referral link if you're interested)
• shifted from Google Search to DuckDuckGo on my phone and PC
• removed all location tracking from my phone and Google Maps (try this)
• started using Proton Drive for documents & spreadsheets instead of Google Drive
• moved away from Google Tasks and started using Todoist (this had the added benefit of getting a synced task list with my wife for shopping and other tasks)
• reduced my usage of Spotify and cancelling my paid plan, in favour of my self-hosted Plex server with my own media collection
• switched from Google Authenticator to Authy
• deleted my Reddit account (I thought I did this years ago, until I got a 'someone is trying to reset your password' email a few weeks ago!)
• deleted my Twitter account
• deleted my Instagram account (technically it was my dog's account but it was tied to my email)
• progressively deleted a bunch of information & connections on Facebook, including mass unfriending of old acquaintances and unliking pages

It's been a good, satisfying journey so far, and I don't think my day-to-day digital life has become more complicated – with the exception of not using the “Login via Google” button for some accounts. I've tried not to burn myself out by changing too many things at once, and mainly I've been spending an hour here & there whenever I have the motivation.

The biggest shift was changing email providers, which triggered migrating a huge range of miscellaneous accounts from my old Gmail to my current Proton Mail address. That in itself triggered a lot of questions of “why do I still have this account” which allowed me to delete anything that hadn't been used in years. It was a great way to clean up my digital footprint.

Current de-Googling goals

I've got a few immediate goals that I want to get through during 2026 – let's see how I go with these:

1. Migrate old Google Photos to Synology Photos – I've been starting with migrating old photos around 2010-12 to my NAS, and deleting them from Google Photos accordingly. I don't know if I'm ready to stop using Google Photos completely, as there are a bunch of shared albums with friends that are useful. I'm also open to shifting away from Synology Photos and using another photo management tool, but just getting the data away from Google is the first step.
2. Clean up my Google Contacts list, and find a replacement to store & back up my contacts – I haven't seen a good replacement yet but I'm sure there are a few options out there.
3. Continue to migrate documents out of Google Drive. With Proton Drive adding a spreadsheet tool this is now possible (most of my GDrive usage is spreadsheets). I also have a folder full of Google Docs files with Recipes that is shared with some friends that I don't know how I'll migrate. Might just have to leave an old version there and maintain a live version in Proton Drive.
4. Keep reducing my Facebook usage, eventually being in a position to delete my Facebook account entirely – I don't know if I can do that when some features are useful & important to me. The main ones are Marketplace for buying/selling second hand items, and connecting with local community groups. It's also a good way to hear about good local events that I wouldn't hear about otherwise.
5. Use Freetube on my personal desktop, to replace Youtube – this has been good, but it's not a full solution since there's no mobile equivalent that I've found. On the other hand, using Freetube only on desktop might reduce my tendency to spend time watching videos in general which is always a good thing!

Future steps to take & problems to be solved

For some things, the convenience & usefulness of some Google apps is too much to overcome, at least for now. These are the products I think I'll stick with for the foreseeable future:

• I have a shared Google Calendar with my wife and I don't think I can break away from it. Can I maintain a shared calendar with her if I move to Proton Calendar and she wants to stick with Google? Doesn't seem to be possible.
• Google Maps is too convenient for navigation and the live traffic information is pretty crucial. I'd like to switch to OSM Maps but will take me some time to get used to.
• My phone OS is still Android and therefore has some background data being sent to Google. I should consider changing the OS on my phone to get rid of that
• think about shifting my home PC from Windows to Linux? Maybe I can have a dual-boot approach initially which will make transitioning easier. With the upcoming arrival of Windows 11, it feels like now is the time. Game compatability might be the only major concern.

The barrier to entry

It's easy for me to write out a list of alternate services and recommend “just do this” but in reality de-Googling requires a lot of work, both initially & ongoing. These services are designed to be difficult to break away from, so prepare to be frustrated at the inability for some things to be migrated. For some, the feeling of starting fresh might be a good thing but if you've personalised and curated your personal information or preferences in a certain way, losing that isn't acceptable.

I also recognise that some of the above steps can be cost-prohibitive. Notably, the cost of buying & configuring a NAS to manage a media library isn't achievable for most people, especially when you consider the cost of buying terabytes of physical storage – all to save paying for a few monthly subscriptions. Financially, the maths doesn't work out or has a really long time to pay off – let alone the time you'll spend maintaining your own hardware & software. If you're only looking at the financial outcome, you'll never justify it. I also don't think it's economically or environmentally viable for every household to have their own NAS either. To that point, all I can recommend is to look at pooling resources together with friends or family so that you have a shared media library, as you still get the benefit of not being tied to the tech giants.

Some other good reads about de-Googling

https://brunty.me/post/de-googling-my-email-contacts-calendar/

https://tuta.com/blog/degoogle-list

#deGoogle #technology #SelfHosting

I had held onto an old 1TB external hard drive which had my music collection and a smattering of ripped DVDs and TV series, so I wasn't starting from zero. In my opinion, this is the biggest requirement for someone to consider getting a NAS. If you don't have a large collection of files, just stick to your desktop PC or laptop.

Despite being fairly old (it released in 2015), the DS216se was good enough for me to set up a Plex server and play music within my home network or on the go, but it struggled at video playback. Only SD-quality movies with certain video codecs were playable, as the fairly weak processor didn't support hardware transcoding. I don't watch a lot of TV shows or movies so it wasn't a dealbreaker, but when a decent portion of your media library is inaccessible it was still frustrating. Regardless, getting a cheap NAS gave me some handy experience in managing a home server and understanding how much processing power you really need to do what you want.

After the Plex server was in a good place I didn't have to set up much else – the only point of note was that I had to call up my ISP and get them to remove the double-NAT configuration on my account, which allowed me to access the Plex server remotely.

More recently I started to migrate old photos out of Google Photos and onto the NAS, using Synology's own Photos application.

Upgrading to the DS225+

I had been looking at upgrading the NAS over the last 4-6 months, using the Plex compatability list as a reference for which Synology models would support which video formats. I wanted to stick with Synology mainly for the DSM operating system; it's quite user-friendly. My focus was on improving the server performance, not giving myself a huge to-do list of server configuration & maintenance tasks.

I bought the DS225+ for a bit over $AUD500, and after performing a full backup of all my data (and transferring it onto my home PC) I took the hard drives out of the old NAS, and into the new one. I followed this process on Synology's website, which was helpful in understanding model & hard drive compatability.

I was concerned that the data on the drives would get blown away and I'd have to restore data from my backup, but fortunately after identifying the new device it immediately read the drive as 'Migratable', so it could use that data immediately. Huge sigh of relief! After updating the OS to the latest version, I was able to jump in and confirm that everything worked correctly.

As far as my home network was concerned, I only had to enforce a static IP address on the new NAS, update the port forwarding for the Plex server for the new IP address, and update a few bookmarks. Everything else was retained. As per Synology's own recommended process, I had taken a backup of the system configuration (into a handy-dandy .dss file) but the setup process was able to maintain the configuration from my old NAS, so that was one less step before I was up-and-running.

Dealing with Synology enshittification

It wasn't perfectly smooth sailing, of course.

I mentioned at the start of the article that I wanted a stronger home media server to play videos at higher qualities, so there was a few furrowed brows and slight frowns when I jumped into Plex and started testing out some HD movies in my library. I'm sure most people have had that disappointing feeling of spending lots of money on technology assuming it'll do what you want, and then realising after you open up the box at home that it's not the full story.

Almost every movie or TV show I opened in Plex presented the haunting error: “This server is not powerful enough to convert video.”

After a few minutes of confusion and testing different videos, I remembered that during my purchasing research I came across a recent change by Synology that disabled hardware transcoding on some of their most recent models. It wasn't a hardware limitation; it was something disabled in the kernel that stopped clients accessing the transcoding feature. The DS225+ that I bought was one of those affected models.

Fortunately, the self-hosted community out there on the Internet came to the rescue – there is a script that you can run that enables transcoding, and you can set it up within DSM to run on startup. All of the details are in this article.

It only took 5 minutes to sort out, and after restarting the NAS and confirming that the task ran the script successfully on bootup, all of my videos were playable. Hooray!

Future improvements

So while I've got the performance boost that I wanted (accessing the server is super-fast compared to the 216se), there are still some other improvements I want to make:

• I need to look into the fan sound; it's definitely louder than the old model. Apparently there's some noise deadening I can do by putting velcro on the feet of the case, or some other acoustic shenanigans around where it's located in the house. It might even be that the processor is running at a high baseline, even when it should be idle. Don't know yet.
• It's definitely time to get a regular backup task going, and ensure I'm backing up the data offsite (working towards following the “3-2-1” approach!) – it doesn't need to be more than monthly.
• The NAS, router & modem are neatly out of the way but the cable management & airflow around them could be improved. They are off the ground but they still collect dust which isn't ideal. A generic case of some description will do the job, or maybe I can get a friend to 3D print something bespoke.
• Work out what's wrong with my 2nd hard drive – I had one Seagate drive that I got replaced under warranty, but the replacement drive also doesn't seem to work. It's readable by the NAS, but it fails to add the drive to the storage pool for some reason. Fortunately it's only a backup drive (I'm aiming to set up RAID 1 configuration) and doesn't affect day-to-day operations, but it'd give me more peace of mind incase the other drive fails (which it will, eventually).

But for now, I've got a bunch of old TV shows to rewatch! Here's to self-hosted media libraries!

#SelfHosting #deGoogle #SynologyNAS #Plex