> I have been thinking about this for a while. Considering I prefer to keep the important data/emails on Gmail or Google drive for security and I really consider it important. Would it help if Google had a paid tier?

It wouldn't, because Google is averse to any kind of customer support even for paying services. Even the "support" people that get attached to highly paid YouTube, GSuite, and other accounts get regularly stonewalled like this person and cannot help.

The only solution? Make sure all of your data is always backed up somewhere else.

That's a partial solution. The author noted that account logins tied to the google account would no longer be usable either. The sites can do nothing to help that situation, since most sites do not have a way to "transfer account". I could not imagine losing access on a potential grand scale like that.

True, the full solution is to NEVER rely on Google as a single point of failure for anything. Which means backing up all photos/documents elsewhere and never using your Google account to auth with another service. I've always avoided tying my Google account to non-google services for just this reason and haven't ever had it be a problem.

At this point we've all got these 10 year old gmail accounts that we've used as the recovery email on 1,000 websites, and while... I guess it isn't really a big deal to lose a reddit or ycombinator account, it'd be nice if there was some other option to use as the recovery email for online banking that had the stability of google.

I'd happily pay for some sort of assurance -- "if you violate our TOS, we'll just put your email in receive-only mode" or something like that.

Buy a cheap domain from Gandi for 10 years. They provide free email and DNS. Use that email for anything you care about. Stop using your gmail account and forward your gmail to your domain's email account. Gradually, you'll switch your recovery emails to the domain that you own and control.

The other nice thing about this is you can be [email protected] rather than [email protected] and you can provide email accounts to your family and friends.

That's still a SPOF though. Over the years I've had various letters from registrars and registries threatening my account due to missing information or new requirements.

GANDI themselves once accused me of ToS violation because one account uses my initials ( as on my bank account ) instead of my forenames that they demanded. I migrated everything out of that account ASAP.

Ideally you need two completely different domains ( to avoid potential trademark issues ) in two different TLDs at two registrars.

The service is a tool. I would not "never" use a battery powered drill upon it's first power loss. It has it's use case. It is important to understand the limitations of any tool. This author helps us all understand the limitations of google.

>the full solution is to NEVER rely on Google

You should have just put a full stop after that.

To be fair I had a lot of trust in Google. Now, seeing these cases I'm thinking about starting moving my important stuff to other services...

Have you not seen all the similar things that happened over the years? This is not a new thing, it’s SOP. And though I think Google is especially bad, don’t ever have important data with a single company.

Start sooner rather than later. It's extremely hard to get off of them once you're tied to their services.

I'm basically down to email and some old Google Drives I need to clean out. Found a project in this thread that should help me with the Drives, just working on email now..

s/other/your own directly managed/

Fully agree. I have a small business that spends 2k/y on Adwords, and support is an absolute joke. I have a significant stake in another that spends 50k/y, and support is the same - terrible. And it's even a challenge to get the bad support - you've got to hunt and jump through hoops to get to communicate with an actual human.

I've heard support is much better for GCP - but for me, the whole Google brand is tarnished, and because of my experiences with Adwords, I always choose Azure and/or AWS over GCP.

We were spending a couple million a year (admittedly, this was probably 5 years ago now I was dealing with this -- so could have been the dollar amount, could have been the timeframe) and never really had a hard time getting a hold of a human. And the ones we got a hold of were generally pretty attentive and actually understood what we were talking about, and could even help most of the time.

However the reps were pretty up front that as soon as a support issue crossed the line onto any other team at Google... you best just figure out a workaround, because even once we'd already crossed the threshold and had someone inside Google working on our behalf, there was just nothing that could be done.

And yeah, this has led me to be extremely resistant to moving _any_ infrastructure we care about to GCP. I have zero faith my account won't just be suddenly banned one day with no effective recourse. And I'd also never recommend any "paid support" option they offered like some people are suggesting they provide, because I'd have no faith in their support team being able to actually solve the sorts of issues that are hard for people to solve on their own.

> The only solution? Make sure all of your data is always backed up somewhere else.

Whenever there is a systemic problem, fixing the system is always a better solution than trying to fix individual behaviors. Backing things up is a good idea but that doesn’t fix the problem, it just helps mitigate some of the effects of the problem.

What makes you think Google treats paying customers any better?

https://medium.com/bling-financial/google-has-threatened-to-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17494518

You can pay them millions of dollars a year and they don't give a shit.

As a GSUITE admin, they absolutely do. ...usually.

No. You should be backing up your Google digital artifacts to local storage or an object store you have access to and can control access to (for example, my partner knows how to get to our Backblaze B2 storage buckets and request a USB drive of all the data if needed, which contains a lifetime of documents, emails, voicemails, iCloud photo backups, etc).

If you insist on using Google, keep backups elsewhere. You cannot rely on them for support (although you might be able to get it, don’t count on it).

What is weird to me, is that you can't really back up Google Docs, Sheets, etc. because as far as I know, the document format is closed. I understand you can use Google Takeout, but documents export to Word, drawings to JPG, etc. You cannot continue with the original elsewhere.

That's right. What you can do is use Microsoft Office formats, but Google makes that rather difficult. You have to download as Excel/Word then upload the file and delete the original Google Docs document. You can then edit the Office document in Google Docs/Sheets (with some limitations on collaboration I think).

I found it easier to move everything to Office 365. Google Takeout can export all data directly to OneDrive without having to download anything.

> What you can do is use Microsoft Office formats, but Google makes that rather difficult.

This right here is amazing and describes very well the moment in time we are living in. When using a Microsoft file format is [righly] considered the "open", "friendlier" option it really means the alternative [Google] is terrible. Microsoft used to be the Evil Borg that had everything proprietary.

Several years ago Microsoft (rightly) saw the writing on the wall that the way they were going to compete was to be the open solution to everyone else's walled garden. It has been a strategy that has worked out fantastically well for them and honestly MS is one of the very few tech companies I still have any respect for.

I've been a Google customer paying thousands per month and support was nothing more than lipservice. None of the support agents could do anything and I had to wait for an "account specialist" to reply every 24-48 hours with non-answers and requests for documents that I'd already sent 3-4 times again and again.

Support and customer experience is an afterthought for Google. They probably don't set out to be cruel, but they're very cavalier about incidental casual cruelty.

If Google won't do it, why hasn't a 3rd party stepped up to provide the service? I'd gladly pay a trustworthy company a few dollars a month to automatically backup my gmail, google photos, and google docs. I don't want to do it locally, since that puts me on the hook for assuring physical safety and backups of my backups.

I suppose I could roll my own solution, but frankly I get tired of maintaining my one-off projects like that after a year or two.

> I don't want to do it locally, since that puts me on the hook for assuring physical safety and backups of my backups.

Regardless of where you store your personal data, the proverbial buck always stops at your desk when it comes to assuming responsibility.

Paying someone else to store your data gives you someone to hold accountable to what happens to your data. But that accountability is always limited and doesn't dismiss you from managing that relationship. For instance, the other party is still entirely free to bring terms and conditions to the table, which are meant to mitigate liablity as far as the party which will host your content is concerned.

Put more succinctly, even when you rely on a cloud service, you're still on the hook to assure safety and backups of your own data.

> I suppose I could roll my own solution, but frankly I get tired of maintaining my one-off projects like that after a year or two.

Yeah, I'm gonna prod you on that one. :-)

For e-mail, you could run an script once a month that harvest all your e-mails over IMAP and roll them into TXT, HTML, EML,... whatever. You could go for one big file, or discrete files. You could even pain yourself and fit everything in an mbox file. Roll everything in a ZIP or TAR ball. Then you'd store output file in whatever service you want.

You could spin up a VPS, provision the entire thing and set up a script that does all that as some service or cron job or whathaveyou. Now you've got an entire stack to take care off. Not what you want.

Maybe this is a good use case to go serverless. You could string something together using AWS serverless. Write an AWS Lambda in Python or Java. Should be one single script. Store your e-mail backups in S3 or somewhere else.

The idea of such a solution is that it just runs in the background and it runs in a robust fashion with not too many moving parts. So, here you have something running indefinitely as long as the bill gets paid. Or amazon doesn't cut you off. But at least you've now got your e-mail mirrored on two independent services, which is marginally better then where you are right now. The only other major constraint here is being able to restore your e-mail from that backup in case of disaster.

This is a project I started working on but never finished. The problem is that people didn't care enough to pay for backups because they (are conditioned to) believe that Google is already safe and won't go away. The cloud is this magical thing that saves everything and unfortunately they don't realize otherwise until it stops working.

Because it costs more than a few dollars a month. The net cost to users for Google is zero (or a token amount) because Google makes their money from data mining and selling your meta data.

Email addresses and inboxes are important to people. They are critical to our online identity.

Wiki mentions Gmail having 1.5 billion users. Imagine even 100M of them paying $100 per year. Makes Gmail a $10B product just on paid subscriptions, that is not a small amount.

Amazon cloud storage is $1.99/mo for 100GB. That's exactly what I get from Google(I pay $1.99 for extra storage).

Are you saying the software to perform the syncing costs more than a few dollars per month?

> Are you saying the software to perform the syncing costs more than a few dollars per month?

The operational costs could be more than that per user if you want regular updates. That's disregarding engineering time.

You need stable business with at least few people employed, to make sure the lights don't go out, and that people fix issues when they come up. Storage cost is probably only small part of the price.

You also don't want it to be VC backed because such businesses will not be worth billions. (and if it will try to become such you will have similar problems as google)

For a competing service maybe, but they're talking about backups. I find the bigger issue is that not enough people believe they need a backup for the "cloud".

> since that puts me on the hook for assuring physical safety and backups of my backups

Only in the event that Google locks you out, at which point you can create a new backup elsewhere. If Google has a copy and you have a physical copy, then Google would have to lock you out at the very same moment your house burns down for you to lose any data.

Google does have a paid tier and they have terrible support unless you're at the enterprise level.

Google One was absolutely a nightmare experience for me. I signed up at launch, the service had severe issues syncing things. Took almost a week to sync backups that took Dropbox maybe a day. Then it kept flagging a ton of errors that basically said a bunch of my files couldn't be backed up. I talked to support and you do connect to a real person, but there was nothing they could do. then requested a refund, they didn't have the power to do that either. So it got escalated. I was told someone would reach out to me. That never happened. I contacted support again. Rinse, wash, and repeat I don't know how many times over a few weeks before the refund finally processed. During this time I talked to a manager who similarly had no authority to do anything. I was convinced support, though is a live person, has very limited authority and is really other there to relay basics on the product.

Google One is $20/year for the base 100GB plan. I pay primarily so that there's a direct line to support in case something happens.

Otherwise I recommend using your own cloud storage buckets and/or a local NAS to store your data. It's easy enough to backup and sync across all of them now with various tools and services.

For the first time in my life, I was able to talk to an honest to god support person over Chat for Google One support (I was trying to link my wife's storage w/ mine and it wasn't obvious how I'd do it).

Storage is paid, so I assume support is available.

Thanks for reminding about that. Seems like a no brainer to me that they should extend it. Google has so many tools that I depend on that I will happily pay extra for them in such plans.

I keep my stuff on one drive, I find it better than gdrive. I think it's harder to google than MS to delete my stuff out nothing.

Why would Google treat a TOS violation differently for a paid account?

I think the hope is that you'll have better customer support options if you're actually paying them money, rather than the block hole that is the support for their free tier of products.

To be honest, I don't understand this. Why should someone paying for a product get better support than someone who doesn't? I understand companies which sell plans so that some users can have priority support, but quality should not change according to how much money you give. It's absurd. Everyone should be in the same boat.

> Why should someone paying for a product get better support than someone who doesn't?

In my experience, people transfer money to other people in exchange for items or services, and vice versa.

The quality isn't changing (and it's not that great to begin with). The free users don't get any support at all.

Yeah, but welcome the real world where this is pretty much rampant.

Want support for working with AWS? The more you pay the better it gets.

Maybe there was a TOS violation here but it would help if someone can explain what went wrong with some SLA unless there is a reason they can't reveal it.

Google provides a mechanism to appeal. It’s impossible to appeal if you don’t know what happened, or if you were hacked, or whatever.

I’m guessing here, but if one were to write that one is unaware of which transgression against the hallowed TOS one has committed it’s possible that a dialogue may ensue... though considering everything I’ve read so far in this thread and others like it, I seriously doubt that.

The only way this stuff ever works is that you have a signed SLA (Service Level Agreement) and the lawyers to back it up.

This is why I moved off of Gmail and Google Drive for important things.

There was a story a while back where someone had Google One, had their account disabled, and couldn't use Google One's support because they needed a Google Account (that was disabled).