Digital Decluttering: Online Accounts (Premium)

This is a big one.

Like many of the other digital decluttering tasks I’m taking on this year, reorganizing my online accounts was long overdue. And for some of the same reasons. Key among them is that doing so can be complicated and time-consuming, especially when you need to move 100s of GBs of data around. This is literally why procrastination exists.

But when I realized I could move my video archive to what used to be my personal YouTube channel and make it available publicly, in doing so saving lots of space on my NAS and in my cloud storage services, I got the push I needed to try and make it work. And so I started the difficult and detail-oriented process of rethinking which accounts I use for personal and work-related tasks, respectively. And then I started making the moves.

Personal and work. Work and personal. It’s all a jumble.

To be clear, this problem was self-imposed. Like many, I’ve opened accounts at every imaginable email service over the years, and like many, I even have multiple accounts at some of these services, like Gmail and Outlook.com. I’ve also used various custom domains over the years, attaching them to different consumer- and business-oriented services as possible. If it’s email- and online account-related, I’ve done it.

But a few accounts have persisted over the years and shown staying power. I created my original Microsoft account, on Hotmail, in 1999 to sign up for Xbox Live Gold. I created my first Gmail account in June 2014 to test the then-new service. And I’ve had an Apple ID since whenever that started; my first App Store purchase occurred in January 2009. All of these accounts still exist, indeed, all of these accounts are still active.

But my key online account, of course, is [email protected], part of my Thurrott.com domain, which I had been using for personal needs until I agreed to join BWW Media Group in late 2014. That December, I met with the team outside of Chicago and hashed out a number of things, but the most important, perhaps, was the brand. What could we use to go live with? My previous site and its contents, and my core online identity since 1999, the SuperSite for Windows, was owned by Penton, and finding a relevant new domain was difficult.

But I owned Thurrott.com, and everyone but me thought it was the obvious choice, the best choice. I pushed back because my last name is hard to spell and pronounce, and because I would lose the domain that is my name: what if BWW pulled a Penton and just decided to keep the site we had created and its domain? George, the owner, assured me that I would never lose my identity, and that even if everything fell apart between us, I’d retain the rights to Thurrott.com, both the brand and the site’s contents. (And he came through on that promise 8 years later, as you may know.)

Since then, I’ve been using my primary email address, [email protected], for both personal and work purposes while using Thurrott.com for the site and my online identity. This account is managed by Google Workspace, because that was what BWW had been using. My other primary account is [email protected], which is a custom domain alias for that [email protected] account; it’s part of Outlook.com now, and I’m grandfathered in on the alias, as Outlook.com will soon discontinue this feature.

And … I’ve been using that personal account for work stuff too, as it’s also my Microsoft 365 Family account, which I have long used for both cloud storage (personal and work) and for access to the desktop Office applications. The primary version of the work archive I recently finished organizing, and the day-to-day work folders I use every single day, are stored in that account’s OneDrive, and not in the Google Drive associated with [email protected]. And for good reason: I use Windows every day and the built-in OneDrive integration is convenient and efficient, and it works well.

But, what I have here is a personal Outlook.com account that I use for both personal (Xbox, etc.) and work (Office, OneDrive) purposes, and a Google Workspace account that I likewise use for both personal (Google Photos, YouTube Music, YouTube, etc.) and work (Thurrott.com) purposes. That latter one is my primary identity, as all of my email, from several accounts, is funneled through there, as you can read about in Email (Re)Consolidation (Premium). But I have online accounts—both personal and work-related—associated with both email addresses (and, stupidly, others).

It’s a mess, for sure. But I was OK with it until I decided to move my video archive to the YouTube channel associated with [email protected] to keep it consistent with the Thurrott.com website. As I started uploading videos, creating video playlists, and then rebranding the channel with the Thurrott.com logo, those things started bleeding into my personal world. The (work-related) video playlists showed up in my (personal) YouTube Music account, for example. And that Thurrott.com logo was being used as my identity in both YouTube Music and YouTube.

And that was the impetus I needed to fix things, to separate the personal from the work. And it is an awesome task, especially when you consider the amount of data that needs to move around, to unwind the “you got your peanut butter in my chocolate” situation in which I had found myself. And to be fair, I probably won’t completely move all of my work-related things to [email protected] (Google Workspace). Nor will I likely move all of my personal things to [email protected] (Hotmail). And that’s because there are some things that Google is better at and some things that Microsoft is better at.

And that reality complicates things.

For example, Google Photos is by far the best online service for photos and there is no way I am moving away from that. Ditto, YouTube Music, my favorite music service, and YouTube both require Google accounts. And so I will continue using these services, and other Google services, regardless of any personal/work shift. Fortunately, the solution is obvious if time consuming to switch: I can simply use them with another of my online accounts, [email protected]. This is a personal Google account, and it actually has various advantages over a Google Workspace account when it comes to different services. (Google tends to target Gmail accounts first and then Google Workspace, if ever, later.)

And that’s how this starts, by transitioning to my personal Gmail account for Google Photos, YouTube Music, and YouTube, leaving my Google Workspace account for mostly work-related things. If only it were that easy.

Let’s start with photos.

Google Photos contains my core photo collection, and because it takes up 244 GB of space (or did, see below), I pay for additional storage. (You can’t use Google One with a Google Workspace account, so I do this through Workspace, which is more expensive.)

My Gmail account didn’t have any additional storage. But it did have a 28.5 GB collection of photos from 2013 and 2014—mostly phone backups, it looked like—so I downloaded all that using Google Takeout, just in case, first. That’s sitting on a laptop and the NAS for now, and I will go through them later just in case there are photos that never made it into my main photo collection somehow.

Then I visited Google Photos (Gmail) on the web and deleted all the photos. Always a gut-check moment, but what the heck. And then I took a look at upping the storage. Google One offers various tiers of storage, but since 200 GB ($2.99 a month/$29.99 a year) was too small, I went with 2 TB ($9.99 a month/$99.99 a year, the same price I pay Workspace for just 1 TB). I subscribed for the year.

The next step was to copy the photos from Google Photos (Workspace) to Google Photos (Gmail). There are different ways to accomplish this task, but the most seamless, I figured, was to use a Google Photos feature called Partner Sharing. Unfortunately, I was already partnering with my wife’s Gmail account—she backs up her phone photos with Google Photos, too—and you can only use Partner Sharing with one account at a time. And so I explained what I was doing to my wife, temporarily ended our Google Photos partnership, and partnered, um, with myself. By which I mean, I created a partnership between Google Photos (Workspace) and Google Photos (Gmail).

And … this was less successful than I’d hoped. Most obviously, it wasn’t clear that anything was even happening. After accepting the partnership from my Gmail account, I kept checking back to see if the photos were being copied over, but I could never see any progress. I waited overnight. Nothing. I checked and rechecked the settings on both ends. Nothing.

Clearly, I was missing something. I Googled this again and again, but what I finally realized is that the collection was copying over to the new account, just very slowly. Like several days or maybe even a week slowly. And there was no way to tell when it was done: While you’re partnered, the storage space required for your partner’s photos doesn’t count against your storage allotment. And there is no way to see how many photos are in Google Photos, or to figure out when this copy is even completed.  So it was time for Plan B.

And for all its privacy issues, Google does get lots of things right. And one of those things is a service called Takeout that lets you download a copy of any of your data stored in Google services. You access Takeout via the Google Account website, where you can look through what is, in my case, a bewildering amount of data across over 60 services. (This works with both consumer Gmail and Google Workspace accounts, thankfully.)

I deselected all of the services in the list, found Google Photos, selected that, unselected all of the albums, and then moved on to the next step, which is a set of options related to the download. I wanted a one-time download (as opposed to regular exports going forward on some schedule, and while I was intrigued by the ability to export to Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or Box, I selected a download link via email because I needed to get this on a local PC. You can then choose between various file types (ZIP and TGZ) and sizes (2 GB to 50 GB per file). I selected ZIP format, of course, and selected 10 GB per file, but would choose 50 GB were I to do this again: my photo collection is so large—560 GB—that my download would require 56 separate ZIP file downloads.

(Which raises an interesting question. Why was my photo collection that big? As I noted earlier, Google Photos (Workspace) told me that my collection only took up 244 GB of storage. But this is tied to the partnership thing: Once I ended the partnership with my wife, her photos then counted against my storage too (and no, she hasn’t lost anything). So the new figure is 477 GB on the site. The 560 GB figure included a lot of additional junk that I later deleted, as noted below.)

Once you instruct Google to create a Takeout export, it needs some time to put it all together, but it emails you when it’s ready. And it happened that same day, which was nice. So I started the tedious process of individually clicking each of the 56 download links, in turn, as you can’t automate this in any obvious way. And for the rest of the day, my photo collection was downloaded to a PC.

The wrong PC, as it turns out. And so I copied the files over the network—using standard file shares in Windows is a lost art and perhaps worth writing about soon—to a PC with a larger hard drive so I could more easily work with all those ZIP files.

In the end, I still needed to preserve space by unzipping them in sets of 10—I used 7-Zip for this—where I would delete each set of 10 ZIP files before moving on to the next 10.

(The originals were still on that first PC just in case.) And then, finally. There it was. My Google Photos collection, not just downloaded, but extracted.

As noted above, there was a lot of cruft in the download, so I removed the superfluous stuff, which included more JSON files than I care to mention. My suddenly well-honed decluttering skills helped here. And what I was left with was both more and less than I expected. 203,886 files in 61 folders taking up 558 GB of disk space. But I could see that my Google Photos collection, which I’ve long considered the master copy of my photo collection, is not as complete as I thought it was, as it was missing many photos that I have in OneDrive and on the NAS. (There were also some superfluous folders with duplicates.)

And that meant that I would need to integrate the missing photos from OneDrive into this thing before I uploaded it to the Google Photos associated with my personal account. (And then to Amazon Photos.) On the one hand, this is tedious and extra work, and it further delays me from moving on to other things; it is, in other words, one of those progress blockers that I had successfully avoided until then. But on the other, I’m glad I discovered this now.

And that’s just photos. I’m also working concurrently on several other digital decluttering tasks, including some related to online accounts. So I’ll check back when I figure out this photo collection thing and/or have further progress to report.

What a mess.