I messed up with my previous Google Photos export and ended up with duplicate photos and garbage photos (screenshots, memes, etc) when all I want are my photos. This mess was already in my Hetzner-hosted Storage Share / Nextcloud and fixing this over the internet is tedious.

So, I thought I'd just re-request the archive again from Takeout, but I neglected to set the file piece size higher than 2GB. So, I could click through 220 individual download links, or I could request one more time with 50 GB file size.

I thought "I can script this. 220 files is fine."

I didn't consider how Google authenticates in ways that make downloading with curl more than a little bit of a pain in the ass. Rather than throw good time after bad, I just re-requested with 50GB chunks. Then a bit of local cleanup and re-upload the old files to Nextcloud.

I stopped sending photos to Google in April 2024, so there's no overlap between Google and my Nextcloud / Flickr archive. Cleaning up the files before April on Nextcloud should be straightforward. Once this is finally done, I should be able to stop paying Google for the extended storage space.

I moved my primary email over to fastmail around April as well, managed to get the foo.ca domain dns records properly setup for email there as well. It's super easy now to use any alias when sending email - something Google didn't really allow for.