On: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account w...

[xlaacid]

Moving forward: always have an email client on a local machine downloading a copy of all emails. Have a local copy of all gdrive contents. Backup your password mangers to a txt file and encrypt it on a drive. And above all, dont trust google with all your stuff. They dont care.

I lost a gmail years ago and only use it as a throwaway email client now. You get what you pay for.

[anakaine → xlaacid]

That's completely impractical for the average, and even above average user.

Just because something can be a solution doesn't mean it should be.

[beepbooptheory → anakaine]

We live in less than an ideal world though, we don't really get to dictate how practical the solutions to our problems are.

It is in a way what makes a problem truly a problem. Otherwise, "problems" would all just be different ways of being ignorant of the better way.

[tomcam → anakaine]

Agreed. What are the practical alternatives to GP’s suggestion?

[stemlord → xlaacid]

At the very least the average person can simply download all of their google data every year or so to soften the blow considerably. something that's actually super easy to do. https://takeout.google.com/

[aagha → stemlord]

And then what?

If you're the average person and have gigabits of email, what are you supposed to do then?

[anotheracc88 → xlaacid]

Google takeout. Do it every 3 months. Easy peasy..

Good for privacy too. It jas everything! Look through it an permanently delete what you don't want them to keeo.

Note that it is slightly lossy with respect to headers, times etc. Not ideal for anything legal related. For those print them off.

[leros → anotheracc88]

Can you easily consume the takeout data?

[anotheracc88 → leros]

Yes. For example emails are an mbox file amd there are free mbox viewers. You then have something like an old school mail client to view emails.