Gmail Accidentally Resets 150,000 Accounts 401
tsj5j writes "Many users have reported loss of their Gmail accounts, as they signed in to find their email accounts reset — losing years of email history. This appears to be a result of a bug which treats existing owners as new users. For those affected, Google is currently trying to resolve the problem. For the rest of us, perhaps this is a timely reminder to backup our data and be less trusting of the cloud."
An opportunity to start afresh (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps living in Africa has given me a liaise faire approach to archiving mail. Life goes on with or without your years of email. In my working career I have always diligently backed up all mailboxes as I moved from one exchange server to another all with the belief that one day I would go back and read through my mails. I have never done this and I doubt I will be doing so in the near future. Over the years I have lost/misplaced some of the DVDs containing my vast collection of email and I have never felt the need to dig through the attic to locate some DVD with an important email stored on it.
I am struggling to read through my day to day mail. I am not going to bother setting up a backup server because I do not have the time to maintain it and I doubt I will do a better job that the "professionals" at Google. To those who lost their data I feel your pain but believe me there are worse things that can happen in life. Have a glass of wine and start your Inbox afresh.
Something Goes Wrong, Don't Trust Cloud? (Score:1, Interesting)
For the rest of us, perhaps this is a timely reminder to backup our data and be less trusting of the cloud.
Okay, Slashdot, this is getting tiring. Every time a major cloud service fails, the inevitable "re-evaluate your trust in the cloud" mantra is mindlessly invoked. Everybody knows that backups are good, cloud or no cloud. Everybody knows that things go wrong, cloud or no cloud. So what's the real value-added to calling out cloud services every time something fails?
The interesting question is how the disaster is addressed. Will Google recover the data? Will it be quick? Seamless? If so, then the real lesson here isn't the weakness of the cloud, but rather its strength. Anything can go wrong with any system, but maybe Google's well-run cloud can handle the problem with minimal incidence.
So, Slashdot, rather than spouting off a thoughtless, ominous warning on every "something breaks in a cloud" story, how about you sit tight and see how this resolves?
Clouds are actually quite violent inside. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm an instrument-rated private pilot and have flown small aircraft into clouds probably hundreds of times. They are not soft and fluffy at all, but are very turbulent and sometimes even quite violent inside. Even the "little puffy" isolated clouds you often see floating along on a warm spring afternoon can shake up a 3000 pound fully-loaded Cessna 182 very strongly.
Re:IMAP sync (Score:4, Interesting)
I suppose a prudent question: when you do an IMAP sync, does it wipe off the local copies just when the remote copy has been flagged deleted, or does it also go further: if you sync to a "reset" remote account, would Tbird's IMAP recognize the local emails no longer exist at the remote and toast your local folders? Will IMAP sync easily upload a whole gmail mailbox back up to a reset account? Time to look at IMAP protocol a little more closely, since we can't 'reset' our own gmail accounts this way to test recovery techniques.
Backing up your local profiles regularly to recover against a "gmail wiped all my emails" or even a "hacker deleted all my emails" scenario would seem a reasonable precaution.