Last month, in November 2024 I faced a challenging situation at work when one our client accounts got hacked. It was a nightmare situation but luckily I was able to salvage most of the compromised data.
The hard lesson that I learnt from this event was to not rely entirely on cloud services. Even a simple email service like Gmail can make you feel helpless if you get locked out of your account.
Big tech companies like Google are notorious of not providing customer support in such cases. They will usually have a tool to recover your account which will likely not work because the hacker would have changed the recovery methods. Apart from that they’ll clear tell you that they cannot help you to restore your account because they strictly follow “privacy” policies of not storing any user data.
In today’s world, your Google account is the master key to your digital life and it directly impacts other services like your bank accounts, social media, subscriptions, etc.
For the past decade, I have been a cloud evangelist myself and I have been convincing everyone to adopt cloud. I relied on Google for key aspects of my digital world like storing my decades worth of photo library. Now after having faced this incident, I realize how naive I have been to trust Google with all my important data. For any reasons like Google suspending my account for policy violation or my account getting hacked, I’ll permanently lose access to my data. Google is not your local cable operator whom you can physically visit and get your issue resolved. Google is out of your reach and you’re non-existent to them. Your account is just one of the billion other accounts. They won’t care.
As a learning, I have now decided to strike a balance between cloud and offline storage. I will continue to use Google services like email, drive, photos to enjoy the convenience of these products but at the same time I will be diligently taking offline backups of all my data on the cloud.