[metters]

> I should urgently get a) my mails out of my personal (non paying) Gmail account and b) get my associated photos out of Google Photos, mainly because of baby pictures which I cannot fathom to lose.

I highly recommend it. It feels like pure freedom, putting a price tag on my personal data. The migration is something done in two steps: set up your alternative service, but also keep the old one (gmail/gdrive/calendar/...) running. Then start to use the new email service, while keeping the old one.

There are enough affordable options and you do not have to migrate everything at once. I started with my emails - gmail is still running and forwards all incoming emails, so I wont miss anything. I already updated all my accounts/logins to the new email address.

The next step was copying all my files from Dropbox, GDrive, and so on to {service I am using}. The data in the other clouds are still there, but I am going to delete it all soon.

There are things that are not perfect - like accepting appointments, which I still want to show up in my Google calendar. To those mails I still have to respond in google mail. But I am getting there, one step after another. The win so far is much bigger than the loss/pain.