Migration Update – 1

About 2 weeks ago, I kicked off my “evil” plan to move as many things as possible off Google Apps. I’ve managed to move my Contacts, Calendar, and files off Google services so far.

I setup ownCloud for contacts, calendar, and files. It was incredibly painless to setup. I have the owncloud, CalDAV-sync, and CardDAV-Sync apps installed on my Android phone and it seems to work great. Good enough that the only thing I’m syncing from my Google account is email.

The ownCloud app was straight forward. I checked the option to instantly upload pictures. This allowed me to disable picture syncing with Google Photos.

The next app I tried was CardDAV-Sync. I tried the free one first. It didn’t actually sync anything to my server. Searching around a bit suggested that I might have to import the contacts to the server first. So, I backed up the contacts to a file and synced that to the ownCloud instance. When I clicked on the VCF file on the ownCloud server, it let me import the contacts from it immediately. The problem with Google syncing all my contacts it that there were 1000+ contacts that I had to clean up, purge, and finally arrive at close to

1. I should delete more, but I haven’t had spare time to do that.

CalDAV was fairly easy, exported the calendars, imported them into ownCloud, installed the app, and removed the Google calendars from being displayed.

Here’s the status so far on my roadmap:

1. [Done] Sign up for fastmail.
2. [Ongoing] Move all the Gtalk contacts to Jabber on fastmail.
3. [Done] Set up ownCloud for docs, contacts, and calendar.
4. [Done] Copy documents, contacts, and calendar entries to ownCloud.
5. [Todo] Setup mutt to use with fastmail.
6. [Todo] Archive emails from gmail.
7. [Todo] Turn lights off at Google Apps account.
8. [Todo] Set reply-to headers for gmail.com account to fastmail account.
9. [Todo] Regular backup/archiving strategy for ownCloud.

I’m using a Google Spreadsheet to track my budget and this is where I anticipate trouble. I haven’t found an online tool that I can use as well I have managed with this spreadsheet that I’ve perfected over the last few years. If anyone has suggestions, please let me know.

Additionally, this is not cheaper than using Google for sure. I’m definitely paying more in terms of server space and backup space for this.