As wonderful as cloud services might be, we’re always constantly reminded to not use them as our main backup and for a very good reason, as a man named Dylan M. had to find out the hard way. He recently discovered that his Google account was disabled due to alleged violation of some Google Terms of Service when he claimed that he had done nothing wrong with his Google account.
Prior to the disabling of his account, he had completely moved his whole online life (all 7 years worth of it) onto Google’s services. His emails, contacts, work, banking info, student records – basically everything that could have been stored on Google, he stored it there. About a week ago, he tried logging into his account only to find out that it was disabled. Asking for help in the Google forums gave him no answers, and so after being very frustrated with the whole issue he decided to permanently disconnect himself from Google’s services – not before writing a lengthy and detailed open letter to the company.
Now this isn’t an isolated case – as there have been previous reports of such occurrences happening before with no solution in sight. While it’s not the nicest thing to say – we can learn definitely learn from the mistakes of these people who completely trusted their whole life to the cloud. There’s no guarantee that whatever service you’re using is going to be around the next day, or if your account will still be there.
Here’s a word of advice to those of you who have everything stored online. It doesn’t matter how reliable you think something is – cloud services are pretty much out of your control, you only get to use them and nothing more. It’s important to have backups of important files in offline storage that is completely under your control.
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