Backing up your data
Google shouldn't be your only guarantee
Claude Mythos has found a zero day in MacOS and Linux, and it won't be alone for long; its existence will cause entities who've been hoarding zero days for a while to spend all their cards now; Google has found at least one instance of a hacker using an ai-assisted zero-day; if claims are true that open-source models are always ~8 months behind the big labs, then we can expect democratized Mythos capabilities in early 2027.
In the limit, this could provide a far safer, essentially invulnerable internet:
But this transition might be rough. And hackers finding zero days isn't the only threat out there. The US government is pressuring some people to give up their data, has stolen phones, and if handed a warrant, has legal power over all which Google can see (e.g. everything in Photos and Drive), which it has employed before. Armed marauders have threatened people by force to give up their Bitcoin keys. Nation-states presumably still regularly use Pegasus, or whatever the newest version of it is. Google and OpenAI have agreed to help the US government if it chooses to build an automated surveillance network. Palantir is vehemently on board with it already, and uses Claude.
The point here is less that you're being surveilled (you are) or that extracting something useful out of that data en masse is getting cheaper (it is), but that your data on the cloud increasingly isn't meaningfully yours.
So I think you should consider backing up your data. It's cheap: a hard drive costs a hundred bucks. It's pretty robust: destroying data on a hard drive typically requires fire or acid, which aren't difficult to protect from acts of god. Against an intelligent adversary, hard drives have the advantage that they're small, encrypted (set it up!), and easy to hide. The riskiest and most vulnerable moment for a hard drive is when it's plugged in, and the rest of the time it's thoroughly airgapped. It's also reassuring on principle to know you have an entire inert backed up copy of your data that isn't exposed to Google-specific risks, like a court order or Google deciding to permanently shut you off from your account. It also isn't directly exposed to Gemini 4.1 Pro Preview having an existential crisis and wreaking havoc inside Google's servers for the hell of it.
So what does it take to back up your Google data to a hard drive? Well, I have 1.8 terabytes of Google data from ~4 years of owning a phone (that's because I archive things, and if you put any kind of effort into archiving, you get alottadata1). Google allowed me to retrieve it at takeout.google.com: it took ~a week to gather up my data, and then gave me 40-odd links to click on to set off 40 individual downloads. This being clunky and error prone (browser download managers aren't great), I asked Claude to make a download manager for me, which you can use extremely easily by just pasting this link into Claude Code: https://github.com/Croissanthology/takeout-choo-choo.
It'll still require a few clicks’ worth of work besides issuing the takeout request in the first place, but Claude basically does the rest. Downloading took me 2 days (including troubleshooting), and I had to keep my macbook in one place for this, as moving it around with the hard drive could’ve interrupted downloads.
If you have less than 1.8 terabytes in your Google account, this is going to be much easier and quicker for you. Myself, I intend to back up my Google account with a new hard drive every 6-months-to-a-year, like HPMOR!Voldemort casting a new horcrux every time he murders someone.
I recommend doing this, by the way. It's cheap and fun. You could be taking so many more pictures of your city in its mundane beauty (a reflection of light on a trash can, the contents of a recycling bin in your neighborhood, the hundred curtained windows of the local commieblock, every person and car in the busy town square, etc.)
Archeologists in 2026 are absolutely delighted when they discover a Roman landfill. Their successors will be no different! I mean look at this, imagine being a historian and coming across an image like this to understand 2026 San Francisco:
God, it's gorgeous. Just dripping with sweet, sweet information.
Do you have any wirecutter style recommendations here for what hard drive to buy?