How to leave Google Drive?

Google Drive has one talent: you drop everything in it and stop thinking about it. Fifteen years later, it holds your taxes, your contracts, your backups and the draft of every project you’ve had. Getting out isn’t technically hard. It’s a move: most of the work is the boxes.

Why leave Google Drive?

Your files there are readable by Google: encryption protects them in transit and in storage, but the company holds the keys. They fall under US law, Cloud Act included. And they live in the same account as your emails and photos: a locked account takes everything down with it, including the employment contract you thought was safe.

Which alternative should you choose?

The encrypted cloud, to keep the comfort of Drive without the surveillance. Proton Drive is my default recommendation: end-to-end encryption, 5 GB free to get started, 200 GB at €3.99/month billed annually. Infomaniak kDrive is the generous option: 15 GB free and 3 TB for €4.99/month (billed annually), from a Swiss host.

The NAS, so your files sleep at home. A Synology or equivalent box turns your living room into a personal cloud, reachable remotely, with no subscription. Higher upfront investment, maximum independence.

Self-hosting, for the most independent: Nextcloud recreates a full Drive (files, calendar, sharing) on your own machine. The full tour is on the page of alternatives to Google Drive.

The main steps

1. Take inventory: what needs to survive? A lot of what’s in your Drive has been dead for years.
2. Export everything with Google Takeout, the official tool. On large volumes, the export comes in several archives.
3. Sort while you’re at it: it’s the only moment when the big clean-out feels natural.
4. Move your files back in to the destination you chose, important folders first.
5. Deal with the Google Docs case: documents exported as docx and xlsx are then edited with LibreOffice or OnlyOffice. Editing and storage become two separate things again.
6. Turn off Drive sync on your devices, and keep the old space in read-only mode for a few weeks.

The complete step-by-step walkthrough is in chapter 6 of the book.

How long does it take?

It all depends on the volume. A few gigabytes migrate in an evening. Hundreds of gigabytes call for exports in several batches, overnight downloads and a bit of organization. Count a weekend of actual work, spread over two or three calendar weeks. Sorting is what takes the longest, and it’s also what does the most good.

The traps to know about

The first: deleting your Drive before checking everything arrived. Open files at random in the destination, compare folder sizes, and only then clear things out. The second: forgetting that forms, websites or colleagues still point to Drive sharing links, which will die with it. List the active shares before you cut off. The third: refilling the Drive out of habit, because sync stayed on on an old device. The last step isn’t the copy, it’s the cut.