If you never start you'll never be free. It's also not all or nothing. You can keep things with Google, self-host new stuff and gradually move over things that make sense to mover over.

I have a strong desire not to self host the “live” copy of anything. If my server goes down, I don’t want to have to drop everything and fix it (e.x. if I’m on vacation, I don’t want to have to take a laptop incase I need to fix any server troubles - I go on vacation not to be on call!).

That said, keeping a backup of everything, decoupled from any account I don’t control, gives me huge peace of mind.

I'm slowly decoupling things and hosting parts of my infrastructure myself. Let it be on a cloud server or a home machine.

Doing everything and/or all-at-once is not practical, but having backups for most critical infrastructure helps a lot, and when it's rolling, it rolls without effort.

One can go step by step and call it's done when it becomes too much to bear or satisfactorily decoupled.

creating backups is crucial. this includes all the contacts, texts of saved emails, photos and so on. Many of these ppl who get locked out fail to create local backups and rely on apple's cloud storage. big mistake.

> But I've had my Google account for 20 years now

Just realize this: the longer you play this game, the higher your odds of getting banned. Once it hit me, I quickly decoupled from Google. It's like playing satoshi roulette for 0.5% gains. You keep winning until you get fully wiped.