Ditching Microsoft and Google

Ditching Microsoft and Google

My main (office) PC recently died a silent upgrade death. This was the machine that ran a lot of my personal life, emails, on-line banking and purchases, Zoom, website development, photo management, and my local network. It did a lot without complaint.

My backups were not so good. Photos were fine, but documents and other files hadn't been properly backed up since around May last year. Oops. To make things worse, I'd been relying on Google to sync my browser settings and passwords across computers — except it turns out it wasn't doing that as reliably as I assumed. Lesson learned.

So I'm officially a bit annoyed at both Microsoft (endless updates) and Google (false sense of security). Older and wiser.

My solution? Well, I'm not going to buy a new computer, no Windows for sure, and definitely a different browser. I already knew Linux was an option. I'd previously booted a old notebook from a USB stick running Linux Mint xfce, and it worked well. I then dug out an old Toshiba laptop that had died upon update and been gathering dust for years, fiddled with the boot settings, and got Linux Mint Cinnamon running from USB. After a week of testing, I was confident enough to install it properly. A few disk errors made for a tedious afternoon of troubleshooting, but eventually it booted up perfectly.

I really should have stopped there. I ran some updates, noticed a restart was recommended, and thought — why not tidy up some cables at the same time?

Restarted the laptop.

Bugger… Blank Screen……

Google Takeout

Back a few weeks ago when I posted about being able to download your photos from flickr & google, because I am a little wary of the “One place for all your photos claims”. I struggled to find a decent way to bulk download photos from google photos. Well there is a way to bulk download everything from google, via there take out service.This is a feature where you can download ALL the data stored in various google service. You must log in with your goggle account and can then select the data set you want, in the case of photos they are downloaded in zip format. If you read the learn more link you can download to google drive or drop box of even via email.

Having such a data “take out” facility makes me a less apprehensive about storing things on google services.