Own Your Data: The Export-Everything Habit

Every account holding data you'd miss should be on an export schedule: quarterly by calendar reminder, monthly by cron where an API exists. The habit costs about an hour a quarter. Weigh that against the standard horror story — an automated account suspension with no human appeal path, taking your email, photos, and documents down in a single event — and scheduled exports are the cheapest insurance in computing. Lockouts are not hypothetical: the widely reported 2022 case of a father locked out of his Google account by an automated CSAM false positive, and not reinstated even after police cleared him, is the canonical example.

Lockouts and shutdowns are the base case

Three separate risks converge on the same mitigation. Account suspension: automated, often unappealable, and it takes every service tied to that identity down at once. Service shutdown: Google alone has retired hundreds of products; smaller SaaS vanish with 30–90 day export windows that you'll be on holiday for. Acquisition rug-pulls: the niche tool you love gets bought, and "we're sunsetting the export API" arrives before the farewell discount does. With a standing export pipeline, all three become non-events — the announcement is just news about data you already hold.

The export tier list

Two notes on that table. Google Takeout can schedule an export every two months for a year before it needs re-arming — set the re-arm as a calendar event. And Notion's Markdown export is decent, which matters both for insurance and because it's the migration path if you ever move to a self-hosted alternative.

Formats that last decades

The test for any export format: could you open it in 2040 with no help from the vendor? Plain text and Markdown, CSV, mbox, ics, vcf, JPEG with XMP, PDF/A, and SQLite all pass — every one is documented, ubiquitous, and readable with open tools. Proprietary binaries fail. And the fake export fails hardest: a file full of links back into the service is a hostage note, not an export. If opening your data requires their importer, you don't have your data.

When a service offers a choice, take the boring format. Gmail as mbox beats a vendor-specific bundle; contacts as vcf beat a "Google CSV". Boring formats are the ones with three decades of parsers behind them.

Automate what has an API

Cloud drives are the easy win — rclone speaks Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and about seventy other backends:

# crontab: nightly mirror of the cloud drive, keeping deleted files
0 3 * * * rclone sync gdrive: /srv/exports/gdrive \
  --backup-dir /srv/exports/.trash/$(date +\%F) --fast-list

# weekly: mirror all your repos from GitHub/GitLab/Codeberg
0 4 * * 0 gickup /etc/gickup/conf.yml

The --backup-dir flag matters: a plain sync would faithfully replicate a ransomware event or an accidental mass-delete into your export. With it, anything deleted or changed upstream is preserved in a dated trash directory, so the export doubles as an undo buffer. Gickup does the same job for git forges — every repo, wiki, and issue export, mirrored locally on schedule.

Everything lands in one tree (/srv/exports/), which then flows into your normal 3-2-1 backup rotation. An export sitting only on the server it was pulled to isn't insurance yet; it's just a second copy of the same risk.

Test-restore your life once a year

The backup rule applies unchanged: an export you've never opened is a hope, not an export. Once a year, actually exercise the files. Open the mbox in Thunderbird and search for something from 2019. Compare the photo count in the export against what the app claims. Open three random documents. Import the vcf into a fresh contacts app. Total time is under an hour, and it's caught real problems for me twice — once a Takeout photo archive that had silently stopped including one album, once a password manager export that was truncated at what turned out to be an emoji in a note field.

Bottom line

One directory, one quarterly calendar event titled "export day", cron jobs for rclone and gickup, an encrypted monthly vault export, and an annual restore drill. Call it ninety minutes a quarter all-in. It makes account suspensions survivable, shutdown announcements boring, and — the part people underestimate — every future migration cheap, because leaving any platform starts with the export you already have.