[roryisok]

Contrary to most of the posters on here, I have had nothing but positive experiences with Windows 10. I don't get served ads in the OS (or don't notice them). I don't see any upsell. I don't get blue screens. Edge is a competent and effective browser, and I often use it over Firefox or chrome, though I still use those for development. I am a happy customer.

I have a paid OneDrive account that stores all my family photos.

Reading this has made me realise it could so easily happen to me. I'm going to make double sure I back up everything locally too, from now on.

MS only has my photos though. Google really has me by the balls. Ten years of emails with friends and customers, and pretty much every login I have is tied to my gmail. If that was taken I away I would be truly boned

[mrfredward]

Windows 10 has been bombarding me with "start your Office free trial" ads for years. I keep disabling the notification, and it keeps coming back when I get updates.

That's my only complaint, but it isn't a small one. Having advertisements so deeply baked in to an operating system is disgusting.

[roryisok]

Where do these appear? I've honestly never seen them

[kungtotte]

Fastmail has a really smooth import function that lets you migrate your gmail mail easily. They also make it easy to regularly backup your mail offline and if you ever want to quit their service they have a "Download everything" button that gets you a copy of every piece of data in an accessible format.

One of their principles is "Your data is your own".

I migrated from Gmail at the beginning of the year and I haven't looked back once. My Gmail is still active and is forwarding to my fastmail account, but at this point it wouldn't really affect me if they shut it down.

[roryisok]

I might do that. I backed up all my gmail using a third party tool last year so it is possible, but my issue is more that I have so many profiles tied to that gmail address that losing it would be a nightmare. If they started charging for gmail tomorrow I would just have to pay whatever it was because it would take weeks to change the address across all my accounts

[kungtotte]

That is actually why I ended up switching. I didn't like the feeling of knowing that I was bound to Google, plus the whole privacy invasion issues.

While time consuming the process of switching only happens once, and now my data is my own again. If you want you can also buy a domain and set up your fastmail to use that, so in the future you keep your email address(es) regardless of provider.