This reminds me how once, around 2005, Microsoft deleted all my email and the address book in hotmail account after 30 days of inactivity. I'm not touching anything that comes out of their MSN/live/whatever division with a ten foot pole, and I will never tire of telling this story. And Google's going in the same direction now.<p>The problem with these events is not that companies took actions to conserve their resources. They certainly do. The problem is that somewhere in those companies there are people that think "Oh, it's ok, I will nuke 5 years of this guy's data, and we don't really need to provide a way for him to export any of hist stuff. Who cares? I certainly don't. Bang-bang. Checked in! Time to go home.". A company that has this kind of employees can never be trusted.<p>Now that the trust is broken they would have to do something extraordinary to repair it. A compassionate tweet and restoration of one wrongfully disabled account is not going to cut it.
<a href="http://twitter.com/#!/vicgundotra/status/94184809936601090" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/vicgundotra/status/94184809936601090</a><p>@thomasmonopoly You bet on Google. We owe you better. I'm investigating.<p>While it seems ridiculous that it happened, its neat that someone that high up is looking into it.
Every so often an article like this comes up, and I think to myself, "Maybe I should export my emails from Gmail and start using a personal domain for emails" and otherwise secure my data just in case this happens to me. But what are the chances, right? And Gmail is so convenient!<p>I think this time I'm going to actually do something. Probably not ditch Google entirely, but ensure I'm not entirely dependent on them.
Shameless plug...<p>Regarding Google Docs, you can use cloudHQ for Dropbox (<a href="http://cloudHQ.net/dropbox" rel="nofollow">http://cloudHQ.net/dropbox</a>) to continuously synchronize all your Google Docs to Dropbox. We will add Gmail and Picasa soon ("just" need to migrate code from showzey.com site).<p>I don't think it is smart to just "move out" and stop using Google. However, to have everything replicated to something you have a full control (not to some AWS storage or one more service) is a good practice. Dropbox seems as an excellent choice since it will be replicate all data to your home computer (and it works).
This sort of thing is why I find myself uncomfortable being reliant on any service where I don't have a paying relationship (and some real human customer support) with the service provider.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Google is a very paranoid company. I once had an Gmail account locked as well years ago, for no particular reason. It was a good thing it wasn't my primary account.<p>Recently, I've also had instances where they log me off Gmail while I was in the middle of typing an email because they detected "suspicious activity".
Is there any way to avoid this at a company where huge scale of 'free' products is the norm? It doesn't seem feasible to provide proper customer service in that business model, and that business model seems to be where things are headed...