[AlanHo]

If your gmail or hotmail accounts are compromised – perhaps by a spammer or hijacker – and Google or Microsoft then decide that you have violated its terms and conditions, they may well cancel or disable your account without notice. This can be done automatically when their systems detect unusual or excessive activity on your account.

You will wake up one day and find that you cannot log onto your Email. Unbeknown to you, your friends and acquaintances will get a message that your Email address no longer exists when they try to send you an Email. If you have no back-up on your computer - several years of data and your address book will have vanished without trace.

If you also use other Google services like Google Docs, Picasa or Google reader to store your stuff – without an independent back-up - you will instantly lose all your photos and data stored on the Google servers because to log onto these services you require your Email address – which no longer exists. 

It can be even worse if you also own an android phone which uses your Google ID to synchronise apps on your device. You will lose access to all your Android market downloads – even the ones you paid for.

What about those poor unfortunates who rushed out and bought the latest and greatest Google Chromebook laptops which use the Google Chrome OS – they will now be staring at £400 worth of blank screen because their Google ID is lost. You can’t even back up a Chromebook – everything is cloud based.

Search the internet for “Gmail (or Hotmail) account locked” and you will see that there are pages of desperate forum postings where people have not been able to get Google or Microsoft to restore their ID and their data has therefore been lost. Trying to get the situation resolved has proved to be, for many, an exercise in futility. Big brother has decided that your account has been used in a way that violates their terms – and you are stuffed.

The message is that if you let Google, Microsoft or any other large organisation take control of your data without a bullet proof independent back-up strategy, you run the risk of losing it - through no fault of your own.

Losing your Google or Microsoft ID can have consequences you may not have thought of.

[asathorny]

Well that's cheered us all up Alan....  Thanks   

[eye30]

I use none of the above so fingers crossed I should be OK.

Cheers for the info.

[asathorny]

   I should be safe too....   

[Shambles]

I rely heavily on Google access, as does this forum

Consequently, I have Google's two-phase authentication installed. Every thirty days I am prompted by gmail/googlemail to enter a 6 digit code that is generated by a Google app on my phone. The code is also requested if an IP address other than my usual ones attempts to access my account(s).

What if I lose my phone?

Well, I have a set of master reset codes written here in black & white.

What if I lose those codes?

They've been imaged and uploaded to a private Flickr account.

What if I lose everything above, plus my Flickr account?

I'd probably be dead anyway.



BUT it's a fair heads-up there Mr Ho, for the uninitiated

[AlanHo]

Perhaps I should have mentioned that a good friend of mine has been the victim of this problem.

He had a Gmail account almost from the year dot, and over the years was lured into using more and more Google services. It is not an exaggertion to state that almost his whole life was safely stored via Google services on their servers.

Suddenly - he was not able to log on to his Google account and was informed that his account had been disabled (Google speak for deleted) because their system had detected he had violated their proper usage terms and conditions. He looked in vain for a phone number to contact their customer services to find out what had happened, Emailed them, wrote to Google head office, advertised his problem on numerous forums and spent 3 frustrating and futile months failing to get the problem resolved. He has lost all his photos, address book, 3 years of family newsletters, his medical records and lots more data which was "safely" stored in the Google system. His Android phone is back to basic - the apps he had installed no longer function - neither does the Sat-Nav which uses Google mapping. He has been devastated by the matter and surmises that his Gmail account had been hijacked by spammers which triggered the problem. The only information he has obtained from Google has been that "your Email account has been used in a way which violates our terms and conditions - hence it has been disabled". It's a wonder they didn't finish with the usual American "Have a nice day"

I didn't start this thread with any intent of scaremongering or teasing people. Quite the contrary - I posted the information to encourage people to back-up their valuable data and not expect one of the large internet corporations to look after it for them. With the computer industry gradually moving to "Cloud" computing it is a salutory lesson on what could happen if things go wrong.

Shambles

You are obviosly more clued up on computer systems and the internet than most of us. I respect and admire your diligence. However, my story is aimed at the average computer user who takes security for granted. Most recognise the need for safe sex - but not for safe computing.     

[Shambles]

^--- absolutely. I only investigated the free authentication service after my account had been [temporarily] disabled due to unusual activity.

In fact, here's a screenshot taken from the "details" link in my gmail account after I'd been alerted

Note the third one down:




My account was [temporarily] disabled but I was notified by backup email (which you can set in your profile) that it would be reenabled by clicking the link they provided, which took me to a password reset page.

The dates shown above are last year, btw.

So I got my account back and it's now fully protected. I just hope they haven't implemented a "one strike and out" policy

[Dazzler]

Thanks for the warning Alan.. I will need to look at my options for back up etc.... I don't use any storage via the net (fortunately) but it would be damned inconveniet if I couldn't access my Hotmail account (90% of my 100's of archived items and inbox items are funny stuff I have ben sent which I could safely lose) but must go through the rest and keep a hard copy....

[asathorny]

Thanks for the warning Alan.. I will need to look at my options for back up etc.... I don't use any storage via the net (fortunately) but it would be damned inconveniet if I couldn't access my Hotmail account (90% of my 100's of archived items and inbox items are funny stuff I have ben sent which I could safely lose) but must go through the rest and keep a hard copy....

For the likes of you Dazz I can recommend NAS (Network Attached Storage) it's safe and secure and it is yours.  Relatively easy to set up access locally, you can also access it remotely if you need.  It is your own private server.  Just connect it to your router then install the proveded software, which is quite simple to follow.

Two benifits accrue from this, the first and most benificial is the system back up and easy recovery.  Come the day, and it always comes sooner or later that your computer fails, you just slip the recovery disk in and the sit back whilst your NAS recovers you  ...  The second is, you can store any and all you private stuff there in safety.

What if the NAS fails, IT CAN'T, you stick to cheap hard drives in there and set it up as RAID 1,,   *REDUNDANT Array of Inexpensive Drives*  if one drive fails, the second drive takes over untill you insert a replacement.

There are many NAS setup out there and they're not too expensive.   Buy me a plane ticket Dazz and I'll come and set it up for you 

[Dazzler]

Thanks for the advice ASA .. I have all my local stuff backed up manually.. I don't really like encripted backups so If I get anything I want to keep like downloaded songs , Copies of our photos or my little you tube vids I save two copies (one to my internal 1TB hard drive and one to an external 1TB hard drive as a back up)

But it is the web based Hotmail stuff I will have to go through and cull then save a back up of anything I haven't already saved ...

Iomega have a 2 TB Nas style hard-drive which I have seen for A$176 recently. Was tempted as have the house networked including the main TV etc.. but need to leave the PC on if want to access it 24/7

The joy of a NAS drive as I understand it is you can still access that with the PC off..

What if the NAS fails, IT CAN'T...

I'm sure you were oversimplifying... but this is not really true. It can.

The NAS is a computer (of course) and like all it can fail. The first point I want to make is that if you use RAID and the RAID box (NAS or other) has a hardware failure you will be unable to read your disks at all in another computer. Once set into an array your disks are locked into it. Your data could be lost unless you can repair or replace the failed hardware with compatible hardware and continue with the hopefully undamaged RAID array.

The RAID itself might offer protection from a single disk failure (or 2 disk failure for RAID 6) but there are many reports of a subsequent disk dropping during the rebuild recovery from the first disk failure which adds to the risk instead of reducing it. Lose 2 disks and you're buggared.

RAID 1 or mirroring would be the only RAID I would consider due to its relative simplicity and protection against single disk failure. RAID 5 and higher have much greater management overheads (meaning lots more disk actuations related to the initial and subsequent setup and rebuilds so that itself can be the cause of a second failure) but still only offers single disk failure recovery. Personally, I think RAID is not an answer at all and would advise simply using disks as separate volumes.

Whatever you decide and whether using RAID or NAS or not, put in a proper backup strategy with important data held in three different places with at least one off-site. The off-site one might be in the cloud but never the only one which was Alan's very good advice. I have nothing including email stored by anyone else.

Addressing the original topic, I do have a few gmail accounts I use for anonymity etc. but these are simply forwarded to my ISP POP3 server (or you could use a work one) from which I then download to my computer (using any mail client I like) so that in the end it's all with me and not held "out there".

[Dazzler]

Thanks for the heads up Pip, Asa and Alan.. plenty of food for thought there...