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02020202

you have essentially vendor-lock-outed yourself. people love to keep multiple things in the same place but it creates a single point of failure.

iirc google requires another email as backup address for exactly this kind of situation. don't you have one set up instead of just a phone number?

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I have actually, but for some reason Google kept asking for my phone number on the device from which the problem originated in the first place. I got a spare phone lying around and turned phone verification on from there to be able to login to my other devices. It's simply not safe to be using a Google Account without a mobile device by this logic. I have in turn decided to move away from Google, my Drive is now like 100 mb used cause of GMail which I have now forwarded to iCloud and am also just slowly changing my email everywhere I had signed up to my company mail or my personal iCloud mail. Relying totally on Google was the worst decision ever I suppose.

Backup address adds a "single point of failure".

I added both phone # and backup email to my gmail at some point, now I can't reset the gmail password because I only have access to the phone and incoming gmail messages and not the backup email.

Following your advice was exactly my mistake.

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