Leaving Big Tech: A Practical Guide
Do it in order: password manager, browser and search, data exports, files and photos, email, messaging, phone.
The easy steps take an evening each.
Email takes about a year, because every account you own points at your old address.
Nothing gets deleted until its replacement has quietly worked for a month.
Leaving Big Tech works best as a sequence, not a purge: password manager first, files second, email third, phone last, spread over a few months rather than one furious weekend. Most people who give up fail on day one. They delete a Google account before the data has anywhere to land, find that eleven other logins used it as their front door, and reasonably conclude the whole idea is impractical.
This page is the mechanics: what to do, in what order, and roughly how long each step takes. If you are still deciding whether to do it at all, start with how to leave Big Tech, which covers the decision framework. Come back here when you want a running order.
The running order, and why it is that order
Every step depends on the one above it. Out of order is what turns a migration into a bad weekend.
| Step | What you move | Rough time |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Inventory of your accounts | One to two hours |
| 2 | Password manager, browser, search | One evening |
| 3 | Data exports, archived twice | 30 minutes, then days of waiting |
| 4 | Files, photos, calendar, contacts | A weekend |
| 5 | Email address | Six to twelve months of small moves |
| 6 | Messaging and social | Open ended, depends on other people |
| 7 | Phone operating system | A full day, and optional |
The password manager comes first because every later step is a login change, and you cannot make fifty of those from memory. Exports come before deletions because exports are cheap and deletions are permanent. Email sits late because your address is the root key to everything else. The phone is last because it is the only step that can leave you unable to pay for lunch. Stop anywhere and you are still better off than when you started.
Step 1: Inventory before you touch anything
Export your browser's saved passwords to a CSV file. That file is a surprisingly complete map of your digital life, usually a few hundred rows. Then search your inbox for welcome to, verify your email and your receipt to catch what the browser never saved.
Put the results in a spreadsheet: service, what it does for you, whether it signs in with Google, Apple or Facebook, and a decision of keep, move or close. That third column is the important one. A social login is a landmine, because closing the identity provider silently destroys access to the dependent account and support teams often cannot recover it.
Budget one to two hours and change nothing during this step. The list is the whole output, and it is what stops week three becoming guesswork.
Step 2: Password manager and browser first
Import that CSV into a password manager. Bitwarden is the usual hosted choice and can be self-hosted later as Vaultwarden. KeePassXC is the offline option: one encrypted file you sync yourself with Syncthing or a USB stick. Both are open source, and the choice is not worth a week of research.
Once the vault is full, clear the browser's stored passwords and shred the CSV. Then spend the rest of the evening on the highest value hour in the project: go through every account flagged as a social login and convert it to an email address and password. Most services hide a set a password option in account settings. That one task removes the dependency that makes people feel trapped.
Browser and search are quick. Firefox with uBlock Origin takes fifteen minutes including bookmarks. DuckDuckGo or Startpage need no setup. Expect results to feel worse for a fortnight while you unlearn how you phrase queries.
Step 3: Get your data out before you close anything
Requesting exports takes about half an hour of clicking. Google Takeout, Apple Data and Privacy, the Meta download tool and the Microsoft privacy dashboard all do the same job. Ask for everything, pick the largest archive split offered, then wait. Big photo libraries can take hours or days to build, and download links expire, so do not request an export the night before a trip.
Open the archive before you trust it. Takeout keeps photo dates in separate JSON sidecar files rather than in the images, documents arrive as .docx or .odt instead of their original editable form, and notes come out as plain HTML. None of that is a disaster, but it changes what your import tool has to do.
Copy the archive to two places before going further. A second drive works; restic or Borg is better, because both keep versioned backups instead of one fragile copy.
Step 4: Files, photos, calendar and notes
This is the weekend that feels like progress. Calendar and contacts go first and fastest, usually under half an hour, because both are standard formats: export ICS and vCard, import into a CalDAV and CardDAV server, point the phone at the new address. Nextcloud covers files, calendar and contacts in one install. If you only need the same folders on three devices, Syncthing does that with no server at all.
Photos are the slow part. Immich and PhotoPrism both import a Takeout archive, read the sidecars to restore dates, and give you an app with automatic upload. The first index runs for hours, sometimes overnight. Notes are easy again with Joplin or Obsidian; maps are close to painless with Organic Maps or OsmAnd on OpenStreetMap data.
If Google is the one you want out of first, the ordered version of this step is in de-Google your life, step by step.
Step 5: Email, the step that takes a year
Get a mailbox from a provider that sells you a service rather than reading the contents. Proton Mail, Tuta, Mailbox.org and Fastmail are all reasonable. What matters more than the provider is using your own domain, because then the address is yours and the provider becomes swappable. It is the most durable decision on this page.
Turn on forwarding from the old mailbox and leave that mailbox alive. Copy the archive across with imapsync, or by dragging folders between two accounts in Thunderbird if it is small. Now the long tail: every forwarded message is a reminder to change that one account's address. Do banks, tax, government and any two-factor recovery address first.
After six to twelve months the forwarded traffic thins to marketing you never wanted. Do not self-host mail as your first piece of infrastructure. Deliverability is a full time hobby, and a server that quietly lands in spam folders is worse than no migration.
Step 6: Messaging, social, and the people problem
Every step before this one you could do alone. This one you cannot. Signal replaces SMS and WhatsApp for one-to-one and small groups. Matrix, usually through the Element client, covers larger rooms and can be self-hosted. Mastodon and Pixelfed replace the timeline, and because they federate, an account on one server can follow people on any other. There is more on that plumbing in the learn library.
The tactic that works is not an announcement. Announcements ask other people to do work for your principles, and mostly they will not. Adding a second channel quietly does work: reply on Signal when someone messages you there, put the new handle in your profiles, let the people who care drift over. Bridges between networks exist but break at awkward moments.
Keep the group chat your family actually uses. A partial exit you sustain beats a total exit you reverse in three weeks because you missed a birthday.
Step 7: The phone, and the optional deep end
The phone is last because it is the only step that can strand you. GrapheneOS on a Pixel is the usual choice, with LineageOS and /e/OS covering other hardware. Flashing takes a few hours; rebuilding your setup takes the rest of the day. Test banking apps, transit cards and car integration before you wipe anything, because some banking apps refuse to run on an unlocked bootloader.
Past the phone sits the part nobody needs but some people want: owning the infrastructure instead of renting it. A small machine at home running Docker and Caddy hosts most of what is above. Beyond that, a community mesh removes the dependence on one internet provider for local traffic. How mesh networks work explains the mechanism, and Blackout Labs sells the off-grid LoRa radios for the version that survives the line being cut.
The idea underneath all of it is in what data sovereignty means: control is about who holds the keys, not which logo is on the app.
Where this gets hard, and what to skip
The honest cost is that you become the administrator. Nobody restores your photos at two in the morning. Your uptime will be worse than Google's, because Google has staff on call and you have a router that sometimes needs unplugging. Backups become your job: three copies of anything you would grieve, on two kinds of media, one of them elsewhere, and test a restore once or it is not a backup.
Some things have no good replacement yet, and pretending otherwise wastes weekends:
- Live traffic and transit routing at Google Maps quality
- Large video calls with people who will not install anything
- Android banking and payment apps on a de-Googled phone
- Work accounts on infrastructure your employer controls, which are not yours to move
- Shared documents with outside clients, where CryptPad and Nextcloud Office get close but are not identical
Two rules keep the project alive. Do not migrate during tax season, a house move or a new job. And if a step stalls for two weeks, keep the old service running rather than sitting half moved with data in neither place. A migration that pauses is fine. One that locks you out ends the experiment.
Frequently asked questions
What should I move first when leaving Big Tech?
A password manager, before anything else. Every later step is a login change, and you cannot make dozens of them safely from memory. Import your saved browser passwords into Bitwarden or KeePassXC, then convert every account that signs in with Google, Apple or Facebook to an email address and password.
How long does it take to leave Google completely?
The visible parts take a few weekends. Browser, search, notes, maps, calendar and contacts are an evening or less each, and a photo library import is a weekend plus an overnight index. Email is the long one, usually six to twelve months, because you change each account's address only as forwarded messages remind you it exists.
Do I have to delete my old accounts?
No, and deleting early is the most common way people get hurt. Leave the old accounts open with forwarding on while the replacements prove themselves. After a quiet year you can delete, or leave a dormant shell with no data in it for the rare service that still needs the old address for recovery.
What is the hardest part of the migration?
Two things. The email long tail, where hundreds of accounts still point at your old address and each needs a manual change. And other people, because messaging only moves if your contacts move, and mostly they will not on request. Add a second channel quietly rather than announcing a switch.
Do I need to run my own server to leave Big Tech?
No. Hosted alternatives that sell you a product instead of your attention cover most of the list: a paid mailbox, a managed Nextcloud, a Mastodon account on someone else's server. Self-hosting is a later choice about who holds the keys and how much administration you want. Start with the accounts, not the hardware.
What breaks when you switch to a de-Googled phone?
Usually banking and payment apps, which check for an unlocked bootloader and refuse to start, plus some push notifications and car integrations. Maps and messaging are fine. Test the apps you genuinely depend on before wiping the device, and keep the old phone intact for a fortnight so you have a route back.