Privacy migration and continuity
Privacy migration is the business of moving a person or small team from a data-rich incumbent or failing service to a more appropriate private system and proving that the move is reversible.
The customer is not buying file copying. The customer is buying confidence that dates, attachments, albums, contacts, permissions, and recovery paths survived the change. Skiff’s closure after its acquisition is one example of why encrypted products still need credible exit paths.
Product
A fixed migration should include:
- source inventory and threat model
- export using the provider’s supported mechanism
- an immutable export copy and manifest
- normalization without overwriting the raw export
- import into the chosen destination
- count, checksum, metadata, and spot-check validation
- a restore and device-loss rehearsal
- a rollback window and source-account closure decision
The first routes should be narrow, such as Google Photos to Ente, Obsidian Sync to another encrypted workflow, or a small team’s cloud drive to a private home cloud.
Commercial shape
Charge a fixed migration fee by bounded data tier, then offer an annual continuity review. The service can later become software that inventories exports, compares source and destination records, and produces a human-readable exception report.
This is a strong cold start because it can sell before bespoke infrastructure exists. It also creates high-quality evidence for Managed private home cloud and Open-source encrypted knowledge workspace.
Boundaries
Do not retain customer passwords, recovery phrases, or full exports after the agreed window. Do not claim semantic equivalence when the destination cannot represent a source feature. Record losses explicitly: shared-album rules, edit history, permissions, comments, links, and platform-specific metadata are common failure points.
First test
- Publish two reproducible migration routes.
- Sell five migrations at a fixed displayed price.
- Measure manual exceptions per thousand records.
- Restore one random sample from every completed migration.
- Ask whether the customer will pay for an annual exit drill.
The durable principle is Data portability plus proof. An export button is not continuity until the exported data can be understood and restored.