Online Accounts 2025 (Premium)

In the wake of my recent YouTube issues, I’ve decided to take another stab at managing my online accounts. I know from experience that this is detail-oriented, time-consuming, and thankless work. But it’s worth doing. So I will proceed carefully.

This isn’t the first time I’ve confronted challenges related to the multiple online accounts I maintain. Most recently, I took on online accounts as part of my 2023 digital decluttering initiative, in which I started off with lofty goals and then had to make major changes when Google–yes, Google, again–changed the online storage plans it offered to Workspace customers like me.

That my attempts to work with Google Workspace support then were as useless and painful as what I just experienced with YouTube support is, perhaps, not coincidental. But fool me once, yadda yadda yadda. This time, I’m taking action. In both cases, I came to Google as a paying customer. I have 5 active users, all on Workspace Business Starter subscriptions that cost $6 per user per month (on an annual plan; it’s $7.20 per user per month otherwise). So I pay Google $36 per month for this, before fees and taxes, or over $430 per year. And what I’ve seen in terms of support from this company, as a paying customer, is 100 percent f@#%$ing worthless.

Anyway, my YouTube escapades obviously got me thinking. At a high level, what I’m looking for is portability, the ability to recover from some disaster that’s outside my control–Google or another Big Tech company cutting me off from a personal or professional online account–as completely as possible. It’s when you get into the specifics that the questions mount. What does this mean, in a practical sense?

To be clear, I’ve done a lot of the work already. If you look over the articles in that digital decluttering series, for example, you can see that I spent a lot of time consolidating my personal photo collection and making sure that it’s replicated in multiple places. But I also did similar work with my personal and work archives, home videos, and more. In all this work, a primary goal–after just organizing the content–was to replicate it, geographically and across multiple services for disaster recovery purposes. And while we may not think about this very often, one potential disaster is that the Big Tech company that stores a copy of this content will screw us over. As YouTube/Google did to me recently.

These events are unwelcome wake-up calls. But this particular wake-up call brought some issues to light that I may have otherwise ignored. In Sign in with Google? (Premium), for example, I asked readers what they thought about the benefits and costs of using this or other single sign-on (SSO) solutions, with a particular focus on those online accounts you don’t own or control. That is, I at least own the thurrott.com domain and the paul @ thurrott.com account that’s my primary identity. But like most, I have Gmail and Microsoft accounts, too, in my case multiple accounts. And I do not own those. If Google or Microsoft or other online account holders like Amazon or Apple screw me over–inadvertently or on purpose–I need a recovery plan. We all do.

With all that in mind, I’ve been working on a to-do list of sorts related to my online accounts. As with something I may write about physical or mental health, I’m just documenting what I’m planning and, as I go, what I’m doing. But I hope to come to a place where I feel comfortable recommending whatever actions to others, too. That is, as I do this work, I expect to get some things right and make some mistakes. And in that, perhaps, there are lessons to be learned.

We’ll see.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. I may add to this. Some of these items are unrelated to the YouTube episode, but were related to online accounts and are concerns I was going to work on regardless.

? Storage/backup first steps

I have thousands of videos stored on YouTube for Thurrott.com and hundreds of videos now for Eternal Spring. The latter are backed up, oddly, though only in a single online account (this feels low risk to me). But the Thurrott.com videos are not backed up. So I will back them up, mostly likely using Google Takeout. I just initiated that process, so I’ll soon know the storage requirements. And then this will need to happen every so often going forward. Quarterly? We’ll see.

? Single sign-in

In Sign in with Google? (Premium), I wrote about my early experiences testing manual sign-ins to online services that I typically sign in to more seamlessly using Sign in with Google. Since then, I’ve done this with my most important online services, and it’s worked fine, so I’ve removed the Google sign-in option for each. I will complete this work and remove the Sign in with Google option from as many connected services as I can. The goal is all of them. But I will also use this as an opportunity to review my sign-in security options at each service and make sure I’m using the best possible security on each. (In order of preference: Passkeys, Authenticator app, phone/email-based, with multiple options for each.) This will be less seamless but more recoverable and, I think, safe.

? Email aliases

One of the related concerns I raised in the post In Sign in with Google? (Premium) was that recovery can be difficult to impossible if a Big Tech online identity (Gmail.com, Outlook.com, etc.) is taken away. I’m OK with my Thurrott.com stuff for the most part, but I have multiple Gmail and MSA accounts too, plus accounts at Amazon and Apple. Fortunately, Will and several other readers reminded me that we can use services like SimpleLogin to create anonymous email aliases with online accounts and services instead of signing in directly with a primary online identity. The reason to do this is that you can easily redirect any interactions you have with those accounts and services to a new email address if you lose your online identity. This will be grueling work and will likely never be completed. But I’m going to work on it and see where it goes.

?‍?‍? Contacts decluttering

As is the case with passwords, we all maintain multiple overlapping but not quite identical contacts lists across multiple services. This is generally just an annoyance–you know you have a contact somewhere but are not sure where, perhaps–but I’ve noticed a lot of issues lately on the iPhone and decided to fix it. So in the same way that I consolidated my photo collection and personal/work archives, I will consolidate my contacts, create a main list that I will store and back up to multiple places. And then I will use a single contact list on whatever phone I’m using at the time, iCloud for the iPhone and Google Contacts for Android. This, too, will take time and effort. But that’s what this is all about. Doing the work.

? NAS

Tied to the first point and to my broader storage needs, I have been meaning to get two NAS (network attached storage) devices, one for my home in Pennsylvania and one here in the apartment in Mexico City. These will sync with each other and provide Google Drive/OneDrive-like direct phone backup/phone and PC access capabilities, no matter where I am or which device I’m using. These NASes will become my primary storage point(s) for all the aforementioned data, my photo collection, my home videos, my personal and work archives, the YouTube videos, and whatever else. And … I want to get this one right. So I will continue researching this with the goal of making it happen this calendar year.

This is a lot to take on. It will happen in spurts, pause as other issues pop up and interrupt me, and then start up again. But it’s important and worth doing. I am doing it. And I will report back on each, in some cases multiple times, as I work through this.

I may expand this work to include other topics I’ve forgotten as well. Let me know if anything sticks out to you. I’m always interested in feedback, but in particular on this kind of work. I hope it can be as useful for others as it is important to me to get it done for myself.

More soon.