There was a disturbing post on TechCrunch of how emails and contacts have been wiped out from some Gmail accounts. The post also had an email from representative from Google acknowledging the problem. Google is “confident that this is a small and isolated incident” where around 60 users have been affected from this disaster.
Google Privacy and Deleted Emails:
If you’ve deleted your own email on purpose or by accident, Google is not going to help you to recover them. However, the Google Gmail Privacy Policy states that “residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems”.
This means it should be relatively easy for the accounts to be restored of course that won’t guarantee that everything would be restored, but it’s something.
Some people had complained about this some time back, but in this scenario those backups are going to be very useful! Of course it could be argued that we never asked Google to mess up our Gmail to start with.
Backups
This mail disaster just goes to show how important backups are. So, how do you backup your Gmail? Right now the obvious way would be to turn on POP Download in your Gmail account and download a copy of the emails using your favorite email client. POP will only be enabled for all mail that arrive since the date of enabling POP download, so if it’s a good idea to turn it on now if you haven’t already.