Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 124 posts

Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data

#111

Post by anotheracc88 »

xlaacid wrote: post #54

Moving forward: always have an email client on a local machine downloading a copy of all emails. Have a local copy of all gdrive contents. Backup your password mangers to a txt file and encrypt it on a drive. And above all, dont trust google with all your stuff. They dont care. I lost a gmail years ago and only use it as a throwaway email client now. You get what you pay for.

Google takeout. Do it every 3 months. Easy peasy..

Good for privacy too. It jas everything! Look through it an permanently delete what you don't want them to keeo.

Note that it is slightly lossy with respect to headers, times etc. Not ideal for anything legal related. For those print them off.

Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data

#112

Post by anotheracc88 »

Try a different network entirely. Maybe you have a bad neighbour on that IP address. Or you are fingerprinted for some other reason.

If your phone has downloaded data, such as emails and contacts, back that phone up right away. At least that is something if not everything.

Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data

#113

Post by taosx »

anotheracc88 wrote: post #112

Try a different network entirely. Maybe you have a bad neighbour on that IP address. Or you are fingerprinted for some other reason. If your phone has downloaded data, such as emails and contacts, back that phone up right away. At least that is something if not everything.

Tried that, the loop remains the same and asks for the phone number and then asks for the code.

Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data

#115

Post by leros »

anotheracc88 wrote: post #111
xlaacid wrote: post #54

Moving forward: always have an email client on a local machine downloading a copy of all emails. Have a local copy of all gdrive contents. Backup your password mangers to a txt file and encrypt it on a drive. And above all, dont trust google with all your stuff. They dont care. I lost a gmail years ago and only use it as a throwaway email client now. You get what you pay for.

Google takeout. Do it every 3 months. Easy peasy.. Good for privacy too. It jas everything! Look through it an permanently delete what you don't want them to keeo. Note that it is slightly lossy with respect to headers, times etc. Not ideal for anything legal related. For those print them off.

Can you easily consume the takeout data?

Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data

#116

Post by aagha »

stemlord wrote: post #105
xlaacid wrote: post #54

Moving forward: always have an email client on a local machine downloading a copy of all emails. Have a local copy of all gdrive contents. Backup your password mangers to a txt file and encrypt it on a drive. And above all, dont trust google with all your stuff. They dont care. I lost a gmail years ago and only use it as a throwaway email client now. You get what you pay for.

At the very least the average person can simply download all of their google data every year or so to soften the blow considerably. something that's actually super easy to do. https://takeout.google.com/

And then what?

If you're the average person and have gigabits of email, what are you supposed to do then?

Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data

#117

Post by theLegionWithin »

> account represents my entire digital identity

probably a mistake - not saying I havent done the same, I have and still do... however, I regularly back up my mailbox and data I cannot live without every 4 months to local storage & then copy the dataset to 2x physically separate media stored in different secure locations. currently using "Corsair survivor stealth" usb drives.

short term fix? post on their social media feeds about it.

Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data

#118

Post by bitbasher »

eonmist wrote: post #106
bitbasher wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I gave up and started a new account. Some people never learn?

What would have been the lesson to learn in this case? What is a good solution? I solved it by completely moving away from Google and services where I'm offered little control over verification settings. I remember I found the related settings in Google too restrictive at the time, and they seem to change requirements over time, thus making it too unpredictable for me. The "verify on old phone" really scared me away.

Ultimately, the lesson learned was big tech isn't your ally nor is the data you lend to them yours. Act accordingly. If they decide you no longer deserve access to the data, they can and will cut you off.

Personally, I pay for a service (email, data, password manager, etc). I also backup my data in multiple locations. It's a lot of work, but I don't really see an alternative at the moment.

Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data

#119

Post by anotheracc88 »

leros wrote: post #115
anotheracc88 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google takeout. Do it every 3 months. Easy peasy.. Good for privacy too. It jas everything! Look through it an permanently delete what you don't want them to keeo. Note that it is slightly lossy with respect to headers, times etc. Not ideal for anything legal related. For those print them off.

Can you easily consume the takeout data?

Yes. For example emails are an mbox file amd there are free mbox viewers. You then have something like an old school mail client to view emails.
Post reply on HN