I spend too much time thinking about and tweaking my digital life on platforms.
I am a long time paying customer for all of Proton Mail's services, and sometimes I assign my domain to Proton Mail. Sometimes, when I will be doing lots of traveling, I instead use a secure forwarding service to send everything to Gmail because I like calendar integration, etc. better. Speaking of Google: I let them permanently track my activity on GCP (a service that I love), Google Play Books + Movies; I let them keep usage data on YouTube for 3 months; everything else I configure for keeping no data.
Re: losing data when leaving a platform: I have never even thought of backing up my data from Twitter or Facebook because my posts have little meaning except for advertising new versions of my books and sharing cool tech papers, etc. that I discover. No need to archive any of that. When I go swimming in the nearby Verde River, I can enjoy swimming through the water without wanting to save any. Same applies for social media.
BTW, a great way to control use of social media and other platforms is to use the https://freedom.to service. Very inexpensive, easy to configure, and is very effective for thoughtful time management.
EDIT: I do fairly frequent backups of Gmail and ProtonMail, and keep local copies of my GitHub repos on multiple computers. My iPhone pictures go automatically to iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive, and Google Photos - funny that my life history in photos is to me the most important thing to backup.
I am a long time paying customer for all of Proton Mail's services, and sometimes I assign my domain to Proton Mail. Sometimes, when I will be doing lots of traveling, I instead use a secure forwarding service to send everything to Gmail because I like calendar integration, etc. better. Speaking of Google: I let them permanently track my activity on GCP (a service that I love), Google Play Books + Movies; I let them keep usage data on YouTube for 3 months; everything else I configure for keeping no data.
Re: losing data when leaving a platform: I have never even thought of backing up my data from Twitter or Facebook because my posts have little meaning except for advertising new versions of my books and sharing cool tech papers, etc. that I discover. No need to archive any of that. When I go swimming in the nearby Verde River, I can enjoy swimming through the water without wanting to save any. Same applies for social media.
BTW, a great way to control use of social media and other platforms is to use the https://freedom.to service. Very inexpensive, easy to configure, and is very effective for thoughtful time management.
EDIT: I do fairly frequent backups of Gmail and ProtonMail, and keep local copies of my GitHub repos on multiple computers. My iPhone pictures go automatically to iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive, and Google Photos - funny that my life history in photos is to me the most important thing to backup.