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Comment by nanidin | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately this requires you to be able to log in. I had an account (with the same name I use here) mysteriously stop being able to log in about 6 years ago. I lost all of my email, contacts, and calendars.

I was never able to find out why the account was shut down, I'm guessing it was a ToS violation for something I did several months before I got banned (made 100+ gmail accounts with my invites, didn't use them for nefarious purposes though.) Just one day I couldn't log in and got an ambiguous page about account deactivation. No amount of emails or form filling ever earned a response from Google. That was it. Blam. Gone. Ever since then, I have not trusted Google with any data that I care about.

It would be nice if this tool worked for deactivated accounts.

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Would you like to be able to access your mails without having to log in?

No, I would like for this tool to work with deactivated accounts so that data can be retrieved in the event of Google deciding to deactivate the account.

IMHO those two issues are orthogonal.

You could achieve the same goal if they let you reactivate the account and then retrieve your data (either with this tool or with IMAP).

I suspect that the tool works by taking the data from the same storage that is used for active accounts. So, assuming that your data is still there, they would have two options: a) write another tool that exports data from some backup or b) first restore the data and then export it.

In any case I don't find your feature request to be relevant to this topic. Sorry for nitpicking :-)

Why would Google keep a copy of your mail if your account was deactivated for 6 years? Isn't that asking a bit much considering you were the one that broke the ToS?

My hope that the tool is activated for deactivated accounts is more for people that suffer the same fate today - if they lose all access to their account, that they at least be able to get their data/life back.

At least according to the page I get when I try to log in, they still have the data: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40695?hl=en&ctx=c...

I don't disagree that Google was within their right to shutdown my account, but it seems silly that something I did at 19 has gone on this long.

Does anyone thing that Google isn't keeping a copy of every bit of data they have on everybody that has ever used any of their systems? I cannot imagine they would ever throw data away. Even if they restrict the end user from it doesn't mean that they destroy the data for their own use.

If a user wishes to delete their account, companies are legally required to delete all data associated with it, at least in many jurisdictions.

Which jurisdictions are those?

They certainly keep deleted Google+ for over two years.

How do you know? Was it in click-through agreement when signing up?

People who deleted their account over two years ago, Google reactivate it by attaching it to their YouTube profile and everything's there.

I had a similar experience with github. https://twitter.com/excelsiores/status/408239093328269312

support@github simply doesn't reply. Apparently, creating https://github.com/excelsiores/geek-misandry was enough to get me onto their "block and never reply to this user" list.

Sad times. Wish they provided some way to export data before kicking off users like this.

At least git is distributed so you should have copies of anything you cloned :)

Sadly, this is the way of tech companies though - skimp on real customer service & replace it with one sided FAQ's and unanswered forms/emails. The only way out of these situations is to get into the public eye & force a response on their part.

I was once locked out of Google Groups. No idea why, I used it very little. My solution was to grab a free Google Apps of Business trial. Now I had direct access to support and could get unblocked within a day.

Wait, so you weren't backing up your email account?

Wait, how many people back up their gmail account?

raises hand

http://gmvault.org/

How does anyone get upset when something they're not paying for stops working?

You definitely pay for gmail. Paraphrasing Heinlein, you pay for it other than with money.

I'm okay with that. It hasn't cost me anything I valued.

I swear people will find a way to feel entitled to just about anything.

As a google apps admin for my work I backup the entire domain's emails - there are a bunch of companies offering this as a service these days.

As a personal google mail user I use offlineimap to synchronise with a local maildir for both redundancy and reading my emails.

Mine is backed up to several copies of Apple Mail

I don't know anyone that backs up their gmail account. I'm sure many people here do, but I am fairly certain 99% of users do not.

What recourse does someone expect when there is a problem with their free account? It's free! You have no SLA or data guarantees!

If you use a native email client and this client saves every mail on disk, you have a chance to have it backed up with everything else. It's still far to be the generic scenario, I think, but it should raise a bit the number of people having their gmail backed up.

I use IMAP clients on all my computers to access gmail so they inherently have a local backup. Then at the beginning of each month I go to Google Takeout - https://www.google.com/settings/takeout - to download all my Google stuff and add it to a backup that ends up in Dropbox. (I should also add that I run my own domain and email so gmail is just a backup account.)

However on checking takeout it turns out the one thing they don't provide is gmail! 8 of the 15 items backed up are related to Google+ though.

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