A Decades-Old Google SNAFU and How I got Around It

Back in 2007ish, we decided to set up an email account for D, who was wanting to start blogging and chatting with cousins. Although I've stayed with Hotmail (now Outlook), probably indicating that I'm old but really because I think it looks cleaner, we picked Gmail for D.

A few easy steps later, and we had an account in D's name...

Unfortunately, there was an unforeseen problem in that I was logged into YouTube in the same browser, and did not realize that meant my YouTube account would be connected to D's email account. When I went about trying to figure out how to separate them, the answer was, and still is, "You can't."

So we set up a different email address for the child, and for the past ten years, I've used Google Hangouts, Photos, Blogger, YouTube, etc. under my own name as the nickname, but with the address d*****.***@gmail.com.

Several times in the past, I've looked into separating all of my accounts from that email address, and it's never been possible. However, D's almost an adult, and is very conscientious of any online presence under a real-world name (or facial recognition, which is why you will almost never see pictures online anymore; I take a few here and there, but never post them out of respect for D's wishes). So I decided to try again.

And, again, the big answer is "you can't."

But there are some smaller answers.

There is one service I read about where you create a new Gmail address and it will move everything from all of your Google accounts over to the new one (and, by Google's count, I was using my identity for 41 products, so that's a load). I decided to try that one out, and they gave me an estimate of $70 to transfer 116ish GB of data, and said all of it should take about 28 hours.

This sounded promising, but while I waited for the data plan on my new account to kick in, I did some more research.

The first thing I found was Google Takeout. This is a free data download facilitated by Google itself, similar to the "download my data" feature Facebook has. I signed up for that, and it created 79 2GB packets for me to download. That seemed hugely cumbersome. I looked in my computer and saw I had about 65 GB unused memory, so instead had it bundle the data into 3 50GB packets, which we ended up downloading on James's hardwired desktop, where each download took only about an hour.

Those downloads actually only included my Google Photos, because while we were waiting for everything to be organized and a download link sent, I did some more research and was able to move many things I cared about much more simply than downloading and uploading.

For ease's sake, I'm going to call the old account AB and the new destination account YZ.

1) Blogger.
AB added YZ as an author to the blog, along with James. Then we made YZ the owner, and YZ booted AB. Boom. Complete blog left intact with zero down/up.

2) Drive
I only had about 500 files here, so it was easiest just to download the files and upload them to the new account. I'll have to have my sister re-share with me (YZ) a map, but that's the only thing I'm missing.

3) YouTube
This one is a little convoluted. You can change your personal YouTube channel to a brand instead. I guess maybe in case you realized you were doing a lot of promotion and wanted to keep your personal YouTube channel separate? Anyway, I changed my channel from AB's personal channel to Gatannah Files, which is somehow considered a brand now because I said so. Then AB added YZ as an owner. You have to wait 24 hours after adding a new owner to make that person the primary owner of the channel, so the next day, I did that. YZ then deleted AB from the channel.

4) Photos


YES, friends. This calls for an announced Angel singing sound effect!

I had right at 55,000 pictures in Photos, so even though they zip the files to send you your data, there's not a lot you can do to .jpgs to make them much smaller. This was A LOT of stuff.

You can add a "partner" to your Photos account. So AB made YZ a partner for the whole shebang. My concern was that, although I could see the pictures in YZ's Photos account now, what would happen when AB disappeared?

Well, there is actually a handy button that allows you to save your partner's photos to your account. You can either choose, say, "Save all pictures of Mal" or you can keep the filter clear and IT WILL SAVE ALL OF YOUR PARTNER'S PICTURES TO YOUR ACCOUNT.

It took well over 36 hours, but finally all of AB's pictures saved to YZ's account, and Google did all of the heavy lifting because they just copied them to a different cloud, or corner of the cloud, or whatever. No down/up action on my part.

I'm still glad we downloaded the data because we can make redundant copies onto my external hard drive once I locate it (found the Mac-formatted one, of course; can't find the Windows one). Also, it helped me be less nervous about actually cutting the cord.

So after all of the photos saved, I first tested it by going back into AB's account and removing YZ as a partner. By this token, any pictures not saved to YZ's account (and therefore anything I might take in the future) would no longer be visible to YZ. BUT ALL OF THE PICTURES WERE STILL THERE!

These 4 were my main concerns. After they were squared away, I finally -- FINALLY -- deleted that infernal thorn-in-my-side email identity for good!

And now I can just waste my time watching TV online again.

Feels good to be free!