Backups don't help with the painful (and sometimes barely possible) migration of your accounts to a new address, updating contacts, loss of mails that arrived after you were locked out, et cetera
Much like PayPal stealing from millions of Americans for a full decade+
Can't backup money either. That doesn't stop these policies of zero human support and only infinity robot responses from remaining until today.
Writing a law and getting it passed to curtail this behavior absolute nonsense.
Complaining about the next 1000000 people to lose access without doing 1 single thing about it. Sign me right up!
Still important to raise awareness, these posts certainly help and make it harder for google apologists to deny it (a few years ago there was a lot more victim blaming in the comments of these threads).
I felt the need to point it out because backups were brought several times here as a defense against OPs scenario which they aren't.
After losing my own 10 year old Gmail and running around the internet hunting down employees for 5+ months only to get a canned automatic response.
I learned to not trust any service. Ever.
I've even been hacked by rouge employees of fortune 500 companies. Only because of my experience I was able to get my account back after being hacked for 5 - 10 minutes.
Backup yo shit fam. - IT guy who has been backing up to 3+ different hard drives since 2008.