Thousands of Gmail users logged in on Sunday to find their account emails deleted. In what is currently being described as a Gmail glitch, many google mail accounts email records, contacts, folders and chat logs have been accidentally erased.
The issue occurred sometime Sunday. Since then, Google engineers have been struggling to reinstate emails as well as fix the overall problem. Although many users are outraged, Google says this problem has affected .08% of their total accounts.
“Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change. Google engineers are working to restore full access. Affected users will be temporarily unable to sign in while we repair their accounts,” said Google in a statement made on their Apps Status Dashboard.
Google engineers are still trying to restore accounts Monday morning, but there has been no update to when user’s accounts will be reinstated or how much information can be recovered.
Account owners have expressed their frustration on Google’s user forum. “Google – I really really really really hope you’ll be able to fix it. The thought of losing so many years of memories, concert- and plane-tickets, friends mailing addresses, recipes, birthdays, links – work contracts etc. is killing me,” one user complained.
It is clear that those users affected have lost valuable information. But, many people seem to have forgotten that technology is always a gamble. The best way to prevent losing important information is to back it up.
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(Source: Business Review)
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9 Responses
Google must refund entire yearly subscription to everyone affected.
How do you back up gmail??
The only way I know of, and I admit, I haven’t done this in years, is download everything to your hard drive via Outlook. But maybe once I get an external hard drive set up (that was a different thread in the CR), I’ll do so!
To #2 jewish source:
You can automatically backup any email you receive by setting gmail to automatically send a copy to a different email address such as yahoo.
This will work for any email received. It will not work for anything sent. For sending and backing up you would have to bcc your email to another address.
addendum to my previous comment.
This will work only for future emails. It won’t do anything for past emails.
@#2 you use a pop3 email outlook thunderbird ect.. open once in a while to download new mail
#2 – enable IMAP or the like and download all of your mail in an email client (Outlook, Live Mail, Thunderbird, Evolution, or any other) on your computer, and archive it from there.
You can enable IMAP for “all mail” including all past mails – but that means you’ll be downloading possibly multiple GBs of mail to your mailbox, so you’d better have a decent internet speed…
I’ve also been thinking about this, maybe this is the right time to do it, before something like this happens to me as well.
Before you rush to download all your email……
….. if your hard drive crashes, you’ve lost all your email, unless you take backups.
How many of you make backups regularly?
Go into settings/offline/”enable offline mail for this computer”. You will then have a backup on your computer (of course you won’t have access to this from another computer).