When Google Owns You | chrisbrogan.com

When Google Owns You | chrisbrogan.com: Just a quick reminder to all of us. In this blog, we see that Nick came back from lunch one day to find Google had locked his account. His ENTIRE account.. gmail, documents, web apps, adwords, everything. No explanation, and no recourse. Now it would appear that Google didn't have a secondary email account or phone number for him, so had no way to contact him. We learn in the second installment to Nick's dilemma, they had a very good reason for locking his account, they flagged a bogus charge of $490 and locked everything up for security sake.

The moral of the story? If you're going to depend on a third party for services, especially business class services as many of us do, backup, backup, backup!! You just never know when you're acount might get hit. This incident hit right between the eyes for thousands of people. I'm sure a large percent of people out there are playing around with Googles' various services, and are considering using them in their business. Some already are using them. You never know when some server glitch is going to erase half your email account, or documents stored online.

Throughout the responses to the blog (of which there are thousands) we find responses from Google Rep extraordinaire Matt Cutts. He passes out various links and tips for account recovery, security and etc. as pertains to Google services, but there is one that I found invaluable. Creating a backup for Your Google Account gives us advise on what Google services we should be keeping backups on, what services it would be wise to install a backup account in (in case the primary account gets locked out) and various other tips.

Read it. Heed it. Do it. Trust in the mighty Googles' services and prowess is no excuse to not prepare for disaster recovery. Once bitten, twice shy.. they say. I'll guaranty you Nick is backing up all his third party services now. ;)

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