A few months ago my Gmail got compromised and it turned into a full mess. I spent about 3 months recovering accounts, pulling stuff out of Drive, fixing logins, and trying to piece everything back together. It made me realize how much of my life was sitting in one place.
That was the point where I started moving away from relying on Google for everything. First thing I did was get my important files off Drive and start keeping local backups using an external SSD and Synology NAS. I didn’t like the idea of everything important being tied to one account anymore. While doing that, I also looked into how much of my data was exposed. I used Cloaked and found my info on around 30 data broker sites, which was honestly wild. That made it pretty clear the Gmail issue wasn’t just bad luck, my data was already out there.
Since then I’ve been slowly replacing things and tightening everything up. This is roughly where I’m at now:
Gmail -> Fastmail with a custom domain
Google Drive -> Synology NAS plus local external SSD backups
Google Password Manager -> Bitwarden
Chrome -> Firefox with uBlock Origin
Google Authenticator -> Aegis Authenticator
Google Search -> DuckDuckGo
Default DNS -> NextDNS
Phone number everywhere -> Cloaked masked numbers
I also started using Mullvad for VPN, rotating passwords regularly, and being more intentional about which email I use where. Still a work in progress (even this much has taken some months to try and keep it from untangling) but it already feels way better not having everything tied to a single account.