For years I’ve had a Google G Suite account.  

For those that don’t know me, I’m an IT guy.  Own an IT company.  We work with and sell Google products.  About 6 years ago, as a test, I immersed myself in the Google ecosphere.  I used Google Docs, Drive, Photos, Gmail, Google +, and even tied my domain, jamesthegeek.com, to G Suite and moved my website there.  

Things change.  My needs and behaviors changed.  About a year ago I began considering leaving G Suite for a variety of reasons.  First, I really didn’t like the website hosting.  I have mixed feelings about Gmail.  I rarely use Google Docs since I’m a Microsoft Partner as well. Finally, I used Google + heavily.

What I found out about 2 years ago was that since I had tied all of my services to my domain email address, cancelling my G Suite account would mean a loss of all that data.  Everything.  Yup.  Since everything is tied to your email address, once you move away from that address you’re finished.  

This made me put off the decision until this year (2020).  Now that Google + was no longer in the mix, I decided it was time to rip off the bandaid.

It was painful.

Today I’ve successfully migrated most everything, but it sure was a near hurclean task. It will be a week or two before I finally know how it all went.  My biggest concern now is my Google Play Music subscription.  Since Google offers no way to simply change the address associated with that subscription I had to use a different Gmail account and start a new subscription.  Further, the process of backing up my music and playlists was tedious at best.  I’ll post this process in a couple of weeks once I’m certain that it worked.  I won’t know until the old subscription expires.

Email and my website, while a pain, were pretty straightforward to move, at least for me since I’ve been through it before.  It’s a manual process though.  Even with Google’s Export Data feature there’s a lot of gotchas.  I’ll get to those in the future as well.

So, for today, enjoy the new website, which should provoke me to do more regular posts, and I’m enjoying a very clean inbox.