For a particular enthusiast this must be devastating. Professional photographers, heavy travelers, family archivists. A couple months ago, they would have decided it was worth having Google hang onto this and now it's gone.<p>Hopefully this fuels more complete self-managed backup solutions. We already have good options for system-level backups (i.e. Time Machine) and although we have the low-level tools (such as restic), the turnkey experience is missing for things we don't keep at hand on a local device, but still treasure.<p>Perhaps I'm wrong? I guess it slots in with a larger desire to streamline the takeout process from all the tech giants. A trustworthy (must be open source) app you can feed your credentials to and have it automatically run a Takeout-like on each of these accounts. Then provide an encrypted local backup.
I was one of the lucky ones:
I had backups turned on.
When I discovered my data missing,
I found the forum posts discussing the problem and the possibility that the data might be recoverable.
No proactive notice from Google about a problem, though.
After three weeks of anxiety I got my data back,
restoring from the backup according to the instructions Google <i>finally</i> emailed.<p>How much data did I almost lose for ever?
Roughly 12 years of travel,
most of which I use to document my photographic work,
as a notebook recording when and where I was.<p>It's no exaggeration to say a loss would have been devastating.
What I'm looking into now is how I can make backups under my control,
to a location of my choice.
Related:<p><i>Tell HN: An update on your Google Maps Timeline</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43441107">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43441107</a>