“Accounts merged and now my files are gone”

I think the problem here is with Google's Multi Sign In[1], which makes it look like all accounts that are loged in are related, when in fact they are not, it just gives you an "easy" way of switching between accounts across Google services.<p>Both Molly and Amy (in the OT) have gotten confused and assumed that the accounts had been merged indefinitely (who can blame them? This is as much PEBKAC as horrible UI) so they attempted to "unmerge" them, ending up deleting one of the accounts.<p>The way to "unmerge" them is to log out of Google. Then, next time somebody logs in, there will only be one account.<p>This UI is horrible, I had a similar uncomfortable moment trying to log one account but not the other, even though I knew that they had not gotten merged, it sure seemed like it. The intention was good, the execution lacking (my guess is that there were lots of technical reasons this couldn't be done cleaner).<p>As soon as Chrome introduced Multiple Users[2], I started using that and it's much better, with less mental overhead to check which account is loged in (I use a black theme for one account, a white theme for the other). For other people/accounts, I just use Incognito mode. For most end users, this is still too much overhead for them, but in that case the only solution I could see is autologout, which has its own problems.<p>1: <a href="https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1721977?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1721977?hl=en</a><p>2: <a href="https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en</a>

I'd encourage people to think of this less as "Wow, she misinterpreted a series of options and got progressively father from her goal state until it was unrecoverable; sucks to be her" to "This is computers as perceived by people who do not make a living making computers work, and we should anticipate them not always understanding our applications and design them to facilitate understanding when possible and make correction easy when not, to the maximum extent possible."

To everyone who says that using Incognito mode or a Guest account will fix the problem: yeah, most of us already know that. The problem is, most of us (HN readers) are not the average Google user. The average Google user is more like your granny. When she borrows Uncle John's tablet, she expects it to work just as if she had borrowed his lawn mower. Lawn mowers mow lawns just fine, regardless of who owns it. Why shouldn't tablets do the same, asks the average user.<p>In addition, the problem that OP describes is only a <i>symptom</i> of a much larger paradigm shift that (a) has been happening for a while, and (b) is in the interest of many Internet services to impose upon users, too. The idea is that a computing device only has a single user at a time. Instead of logging in and out all the time, you just stay logged in indefinitely, so that identification of a device suffices to identify the owner and everything you do on your device can be attributed to you. Logout means nothing if they can still track you with extremely-difficult-to-delete "evercookies".<p>The problem is, even today, most devices are only single-user 99% of the time. Ordinary people borrow one another's laptops, tablets, and phones all the time. Because devices get lost, stolen, damaged, or out of battery all the time. Because when your best friend buys a shiny new iPad X, she lets you borrow it for a couple of hours. Desktop OS's have Guest accounts, but they are often not enabled by default, and even when enabled, it's a hassle to switch accounts. So when a service is designed on the assumption that a device only has one user at a time, it works 99% of the time, but it fails in an ugly way the other 1% of the time.<p>When a cousin borrows your brand-spanking-new Android-based LTE-enabled DSLR (I don't know if such devices exist, but why not?) to take pictures on her trip to Hawaii, you shouldn't have to worry about having inappropriate photos of her automatically uploaded to your Dropbox and stay there even after she deletes them from the camera. Ditto for your Gmail app, any other app that identifies your device with you, and any web app for PCs that work under similar assumptions. Something is suboptimal here, though I'm not sure how it might be fixed without great inconvenience.

Well hindsight is always 20/20, but I don't think it's fair to just say "should have done x" at this point. It happened. It's done. Now where do you go from here?<p>This is the one thing in Facebook's favor (you can criticize privacy, but it's still a good feature IMO). There's an "undo" for deletes available for a short period.<p>Also, I have a habit of keeping a secondary email where I forward a copy of all incoming messages. It's a bit of a hassle, but that's another free provider so in the unlikely event one gets nuked, I can quickly grab my things via POP on the secondary (and leave a copy there). So that's 3 places I keep attachments etc... for the future.<p>You always sacrifice independence and self-sufficiency for a bit of convenience, whether it's accounts or milk. Not quite ready to keep my own cow yet, but I'm counting on my neighbor's one for my daily supply for now.

Jesus, this is the top of the front page?<p>Not only did this user not merge their account (because that doesn't happen, as many people here have noted), deleting your account is a pain and a decent amount of work that is difficult to do accidentally (see this walkthrough[1] about how explicit the process is: you have to click a checkbox for each product you currently use), <i>and</i> there is an account restore procedure after deletion[2].<p>Now, it is possible this user was confused and did all these things, then waited too long to try to restore their account, but there's not much else you can do for a person like this. You don't want a deleted account to be restorable for too long. They ask about Drive documents, but a mainstream and obvious backup for that <i>does</i> exist (not sure what it does if your account is deleted, though). Maybe make multiple sign-in disabled by default so that people won't accidentally do it? That's just going to annoy a different class of users...<p>Regardless, if people are going to reflexively vote up every bad user story in the google product forums (and why stop there? there are help forums all over the internet!), the front page is going to be...not very interesting.<p>[1] <a href="http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57388685-285/how-to-back-up-then-delete-your-google-account/" rel="nofollow">http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57388685-285/how-to-back...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1212172?hl=en&#38;ref_topic=2382753" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1212172?hl=en&#38...</a>

I don't really understand how this process works. I use multiple accounts from the same machine every day. I'm usually signed into more than one at the same time. But there's no indication that the accounts have been "merged" to any degree, or there being a primary account.<p>Can someone shed some more light?

I think there are two lessons:<p>1) Use Incognito when using other machines, or<p>2) Don't trust Google with precious things.

There is certainly something broken with google's multiple sign-ons. Here is what happened yesterday:<p>- My wife was logged into her Gmail account.<p>- I then logged into my wife's Picassa web account to share pictures with someone. I needed some information (an email address) from my own gmail. So for so good.<p>- So I logged my wife out of her gmail while keeping her signed in to Picassa web.<p>- Then I logged into my Gmail and got the info I needed.<p>_ I came back to my wife's picassa web acciount and when I tried to share an album with someone by entering the email address, whoops I get a 403 FOrbidden error. WTF!!<p>After a few mins of thinking, I thought why not log me out of Gmail and login back as my wife suspecting that google might be confused b/w 2 logins ? Bingo!! It worked. WTF google. Seriously!!

The title of this post is horribly misleading. It's perfectly safe to log into your Google account on a friend's machine.

In addition to this, Gmail puts message's subject in page title. Someone can check History and read your subjects. These can be quite revealing, for example when you're into some kinky kind of sex. I don't fancy censoring the subject each time I write a message.

Letting your friend use your machine?<p>If it's a one-minute look-up, open an incognito window for him. If longer, <i>log off of your google account</i>. And other accounts, preferably.<p>It's best to switch the desktop user to 'guest', it's easy under most OSes now.

Anyone else think the title is a bit too linkbaity? Only the Sith deal in absolutes...<p>("Never log into a Google account on a friend's machine", in case it gets changed later.)

That's one way to get to inbox zero. ;)<p>I would move away from Gmail completely but it's great for the search capabilities and Google Drive is really nice for a good enough doc suite.<p>One of these days when I get enough time I will download all my messages and just use Gmail / Drive as a container for archived info I want to be able to access from anywhere and use the Gmail search capabilities.<p>To the other suggestions, I would add that you should get your own domain name for your email to go to. That way you can switch the back-end service at any time.<p>If I know ahead of time that I might have to use a Windows computer that I don't own, I carry around a USB drive with Portable Apps and everything encrypted with TrueCrypt. I have been able to put together a pretty decent dev environment on a USB stick (except that USB sticks are slow.)<p>That's probably still asking for trouble though. You never know what someone might have installed on their computer. A separate browser as a portable app won't protect you from key loggers.

Once I wanted to delete one of the blogs I had with Tumblr and, in the end, without understanding what was happening, I deleted my account instead. I'm usually very good understanding workflows so I got really surprised by that outcome. It was also not possible to recover any data. I kept a diary there so it really sucked.

Ah perils of storing important documents on a free service. It's good only as long as it lasts. And since you are not a customer for the service, expecting them to do do anything to bring it back is too much to ask for.

How are these people deleting their friends accounts without a password? Does Google not confirm your password a second time when deleting your entire account? Seems silly if they don't.

I would <i>never</i> let alone log in under one of my logins on any machine, or log in under someone else's login, on a system which supports multiple logins. I mean, even on the shared home theater box, I have separate logins. Too many keys, dotfiles, etc.

What if you go to GMail and then go to the bottom right which says "Last account activity"? Click on the "Details" option and then "Sign out all other sessions". Does that help?

This just happened to me and it deleted all my bookmarks and settings and synced with the new users settings and added their bookmarks. So frustrating.

Or always use an incognito window at least.

My biggesT beef with multiple signin is dealing with google analytics/the other products that don't support it yet.

Agree with the general sentiment here. Multi-account support is an awful experience. I use Chrome profiles.

&#62;I let someone else borrow my computer<p>This is precisely why there is a guest account on my computer that other people can use. It's fully sand-boxed in the sense they can't access accounts I'm logged into. It should really be enabled by default on all OSes.

People think I'm weird for logging into Gmail with IMAP from Thunderbird. Not mucking with browser sign-ins is one of my reasons for it.

Google backup service seems like a valuable proposition. I assume someone's already implemented that.

Using a different browser than the one used by the friend would prevent this from occurring.

Solution:<p>1) find backup<p>2) restore from backup<p>3) live happily ever after<p>Of wait, you dont have backup...

Show the importance of gmvault...

ctrl/cmd + shift + n

File this under why I don't use Gmail or any other Google service

If you suspect malicious intent, then never do this. A key logger will reveal your password immediately, and a rouge browser will save your session even though it will tell you that you signed out.<p>However, for 99.999% of the cases, just use incognito mode and close the window after you are done. Next!