Comment by jedberg
5 years ago
I had a scare this weekend, when I loaded Gmail and it told me "This account is not available". Luckily it only lasted five minutes, so it must have been a temporary glitch, but I was already trying to figure out how to get in touch with people I know at Google without my Gmail account.
I've had that account for seventeen years. I signed up on the first week it went public. It has a lot of my history in there.
I've done regular takeouts as backups, but that's still not a good substitute. I pay Google money, but that doesn't really assuage me.
Wow, I just looked and my Gmail welcome message is from Fri, Dec 3, 2004, 3:08 AM. Which means that my Gmail is almost 17 years old I've got to do the takeout backups.
It is amazing how easy is for these type of companies to singlehandedly leave you without access to your own media.
To be honest, a similar thing happened to me when Microsoft decided to remove my Hotmail data after 3 months of not logging in. And also to my original linuxmail.org email... which was a cool email server that one day just disappeared (along with all my conversations) back when the inbox size was max 4MB.