I wish I had done this in 2015. I lost the only pictures of my now deceased dog in Google Drive when I was locked out for no reason. Except I didn't regain access because I didn't make a popular Reddit or blog post.
Apparently Google's "customer service" runs as follows:
1. Don't provide any customer service email address.
2. Don't provide any contact form.
3. Don't provide any phone number.
4. Don't respond when people resort to sending snail mail.
(Yes really I tried and I'm not the only one).
5. Provide a forum where 999/1000 posts don't get a response.
6. Suddenly respond if it affects public relations. (ea. a popular Reddit post).
Google is just far too big. They don't have time for you. There are loads of smaller service providers that are great with customer service and don't use scripts that will randomly ban your account.
Another option is to use a desktop email program like Thunderbird to download your gmail via IMAP. That way you can backup more frequently without having to download the entire archive. To make sure it downloads everything, you can switch to offline mode and have it download everything for offline viewing.
I do this with Thunderbird, but copy the emails to a local folder to keep my online inbox clear. I've done it for years and just yesterday it decided to delete my local inbox. Good times.
I have no idea what caused it. This happened during my backup process so I lost about a month worth of personal emails. Definitely a nuisance but i don't think I lost anything critical.
It looks like the offline backup process needs to be:
- Download emails with thunderbird (using IMAP so they aren't deleted online)
You might need to check with your administrator (or if you yourself are managing it, you need to log in with admin account), there is a option somewhere there at admin.google.com to let your users export data.
Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately, I searched the settings and can't find anything that seems related that isn't already set to ON. I'm the only user (Super Admin).
I do this quarterly, not just for GMail but for everything (photos, docs etc). It's very inconvenient, and I'd pay for a service that would automate that.
I use gmvault to daily download email from all my accounts, I am going to look into other tools to handle photos/docs. It shouldn't be terribly hard to do docs/email (photos would require a lot more space).
