What If You Lost Access To Your Google Account?

I’m a big fan of Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Adsense, Analytics, and other great sites and tools by Google. However, I’ve heard horror stories of people losing access to their accounts for random or unknown reasons that virtually leaves them without access to a large amount of their data. Read on for some ideas on how to minimize the risks of relying on Google’s sites so you don’t lose your data and you minimize any potential downtime in your daily routine.

The number one way to protect yourself from losing access to your Google account is to choose a secure password and keep it secret!

We all hate the number of passwords we have to remember and we have shortcuts for remembering them all. Some of these are shortcuts like using the same password over again, using a simple word, using our birthday, or using abc123. If you set a separate, different password for only one account it should be your Google account.

Your password should be at least 9 or 10 characters long. A great method for choosing and remembering a long password like this is to choose a long word(s) and replace characters that look like numbers with numbers. For example, “ILIKEJELLO” would be changed to “1L1K3J3LL0″.

Another great method is to think up a sentence that’s easy to remember and take the a letter from the same position in each word. For example, “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” could be “tqbfjotld”. Or, you could take the second letter from each word “hurouvhao”.

Set your alternate email address and security question

Google allows you to reset your account password via your alternate email address. Be sure to add an address and a good security question. Make sure your security question has only one exact answer. An example of a bad question and answer is if you grew up with two dogs and the question asks for the name of your childhood dog. You can’t be sure which dog it is that you put a year earlier.

Create a backup Google Account

Making another google account and giving it access to most, if not all, the Google applications will allow you to at least keep access to your data.

• Gmail: You can set up your backup account to be able to send email as if it were from your primary account. It’s also possible to have your primary account forward copies of all your mail to your backup account. Some people suggest sending backups to an alternate service provider instead of Google.
• Calendar: Give your backup account access to view and edit your calendar.
• Docs: Individual documents can be shared with your backup account.
• Analytics: Each analytics account (site) can have access given to your backup account

I think the pattern is obvious– give your backup account access to anything and everything you can!