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.