I gave going 100% anti Google a 100% try. Moved over to Dropbox, moved over to iCloud and Cotse, used Safari, and ... at first it felt good for awhile but the time investment, work required, inconvenience (not everything has multi-device support) wasn't worth it. Dropbox was probably the easiest (because I have FIOS) - I was able to download all my info and upload it within a few days (118GB).
Email was the WORST. Going from Gmail to something like Cotse was difficult. Spam catching is horrible outside of gmail.
If I had more free time and more patience, I could see going "no google" permanently but ... the real eye opener for me was going back to Google. Having my history, passwords, bookmarks synced across all platforms (Windows, Mac, iOS) with Chrome, email that could be checked from anywhere and saved (and searched super fast), and Google Docs... didn't realize how much I would miss these. Google Drive stores some 80GB of photos/videos for me for free (Google Drive shows I'm only using 12GB) and 480 MB of docx files are stored for free as Google Docs (several thousand) - only paying $1.99/mo ($24/year) for 100GB - with past Chromebooks and Local Guides I have 2.5TB on Google Drive.
Dropbox, Cotse, and a few other companies got some business from me and my data is "backed up" in more than one place now which is nice but like
@oneMadRssn said - everyone I know uses gmail (my work included) so I don't regret trying what I did but I've decided to go back for now.
Really appreciate all the info and posts. Thank you!
