An Example of a Sad Google Account Recovery Failure and Its Effects • Hacker News Board

Re: An Example of a Sad Google Account Recovery Failure and Its Effects

#131

Post by Tozen » Tue, May 23, 2023, 7:18 AM UTC

madaxe_again wrote: post #90

justin_oaks wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of a free GMail account, the user who doesn't get the support they need can get a full refund. In all seriousness, how does it even make sense to regulate expensive customer support for a free product? If you do, you may not have any free products anymore. But perhaps we'd be better off having decent customer support with no free products. As for paid products, it does make some sense to have some minimum…

Gmail is not free. You may not be paying for it with cash money, but you are paying for it with your privacy, and you’d better believe they profit from having your data.

> You may not be paying for it with cash money, but you are paying for it with your privacy, and you’d better believe they profit from having your data.

Truth. People using Gmail can pick one of the options below:

A) "If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product"

B) "If you’re not paying for it; you are the product"

Re: An Example of a Sad Google Account Recovery Failure and Its Effects

#132

Post by powerapple » Tue, May 23, 2023, 7:48 AM UTC

indrora wrote: post #123

powerapple wrote: post #101

This is the 6th month that I lost access to my gmail account because I forgot my password (I was forced to change it prior to that, and I changed my devices). I lost access to many services from McDonald reward program to bank account (which I can recover I think). I just think it is such a bad idea to use email for accounts. I have migrated to iCloud email because it has a reasonable recovery process I can trust. I…

Have you considered the use of a tool such as a password manager or book?

In the past I have been using iCloud to manage my passwords, but since gmail was my primary, I had the password for many years, I was able to remember it, didn't think it was necessary to use keep this particular account in iCloud. Then 2FA was introduced then forced on my account, I was also forced to change my password because Google was tightening its security (I don't remember exactly), I think that's when it went wrong. The funny thing with Google is that the recovery option should be my phone, somehow it is not enough for Google.

Now I would absolutely use a password manager.

Re: An Example of a Sad Google Account Recovery Failure and Its Effects

#133

Post by em-bee » Tue, May 23, 2023, 12:05 PM UTC

usernew wrote: post #128

em-bee wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

depends on where you host your data. a decent provider will include a few terabytes of traffic per month. and since you won't have a lot of people accessing that data, your traffic won't exceed that of a moderately popular website.

But that's my point, to answer the question asked. You're mirroring between two cloud providers, one cuts you off and you need to egress all your data ASAP from that provider, to a new one. If you have your primary local, you just push to the new provider free. Example: my work places all our files, including your docs and desktop folder, on OneDrive. There is a local cache, but they don't actually let you do a full…

sure, i understand that. but it suggests that OneDrive may be convenient but ends up being expensive for lots of data. i have a root server, which means more work to set up, but i get 10TB traffic per month included in the hosting price. i am more likely to get in trouble with my local ISP if i download more than 1TB than with my hosting provider.

anyways, we obviously both agree that having a local copy is a good idea either way, and i appreciate your additional examples of the problems that one can run into with a remote only backup