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...