Google reminds us that Google Chat can be used with friends and family
While Messages and RCS is how Google wants you to message friends, Google Chat also fits that role and the company today reminded us...
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The bigger obstacle, of course, for Google is that Messages and RCS exists. I don’t think the company has ever laid out the difference between the two products or when you’d use one over the other.
And, yet again, we see the launch of another Google product that will shut it's doors soon.
It's unfortunate. I'm hesitant toward adopting any Google apps and services these days out of fear it'll be shuttered or drastically changed. I miss having Google Photos and Drive linked up!
Yeah, their Google Photos free forever stunt put me off Google services. These days, I've taken my contact, and calendar syncing on a self-hosted Nextcloud instance. My notes have shifted from Google to Nextcloud Notes. For Photos, Nextcloud Photos is unfortunately not up to par, so I have a Photoprism instance set up to provide the same functionality, but under my control.
If at all possible, you should definitely give Nextcloud a try!
Do you happen to have any good solutions for off-site backups?
I haven't set anything up yet myself. But, a Synology NAS makes it trivial for you to set up an offsite backup fairly easily.
I'd personally be hoping for something cloud-based but secure and affordable. I may be asking for too much! I currently get 5TB with Google.
Yep, you're unlikely to get a better deal than what Google provides if you're looking for cloud based.
But — "the cloud" is a vague term.
Let's say you have a PC with a hard drive attached to it. If the PC has an Internet connection, you are technically able to access the files on that hard drive from anywhere in the world (provided you configure certain software to allow you to do so). At this point, you're looking at your own "cloud".
If you switch that PC and hard drive out for a Synology NAS with 2 or 3 hard drives, then you have a dedicated personal cloud.
Also, while it's great that Google provides several TB worth of storage, there's no way for us to know when that will go away. I'd rather have my most precious documents under my control - either backed up and archived on tapes or optical drives, or even digitally on flash drives.
I'm more thinking about off-site backups that I don't have to manage. All of my family are out of town and not tech savvy, so even simple things can become tedious.
I do keep a 1:1 copy of everything from my Google Drive locally, I just like knowing that it wouldn't be lost in a fire (along with being able to use Google Photos on-the-go). I was considering something like Backblaze but haven't looked too much into it.
Yep, you can have Google Drive pull down data on a PC with Backblaze installed, which will then sync to an offsite location with the entire Google Drive data.
@cole@lemdro.id set something similar up recently IIRC
SyncThing can sync photos to anywhere you like. Set it up on a small VPC or whatever, mount Backblaze B2 as a fuse drive with s3fs, and put your syncthing dir in there. Easy offsite backups