I remember a story (maybe from here?) a couple years back where someone had their gmail account blocked - and they lost google services - and they needed access

I remember a story (maybe from here?) a couple years back where someone had their gmail account blocked - and they lost google services - and they needed access to docs and other things to work with his team.. and after trying for days to get it brought back, he was essentially laid off from work as he could not participate in any of the tools that were being used by the rest of the company. I had a time a while back when my youtube account got blocked - and then I found that googleplus had put a block on the account and it auto-blocked the youtube videos - and they said all the videos were find for youtube and no problem there - but they would not go over the heads of the googleplus team, so we were screwed. we should have posted on many more sites your advice about "you don't own your own mailbox. When was the last time you made a backup of your GMail account? What contingency plan do you have in-place if Google ever accidentally, unintentionally, or in this case, intentionally, shuts it down?" like how this site has recently added info about big G's censorship: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21490272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21490272 most people don't know about these issues - they just assume gmail will be there, and google's search shows truth.