Everyone: Please please please don't write your books in Google Docs. Frankly don't use Google Drive for personal stuff.
Their terms of service say they take down stuff like content related to terrorism and trafficking, but this Google Sheet was literally a list of movies I'd watched this year and books I'd read.
Holy smokes, guys. It's way worse than I thought. Google actually took away access to every single file of fiction writing I'd made on that account. BUT I backed it all up on Scrivener yesterday by coincidence. So I haven't lost my work, but I could have just lost the 12,000 words I've written this month after a year of really intense writer's block. I honestly don't know what that would have done to my psyche.
Please be careful out there, folks! <3
update on this: I had no way whatsoever to get my files back through my personal Gmail account. Google says you can file an appeal, but you need to access the document first, and every time I clicked a document, it disappeared! Kafkaesque nightmare company!!!
I have a separate business Gmail account, and when you have a business account, you can contact actual human customer service. (They still make it pretty difficult to figure out how to do this, but by no means impossible.)
I video chatted with a very nice man who is not responsible for Google's garbage. He restored my files!!! But he couldn't tell me why everything had disappeared, and he said it's perfectly likely it'll happen again. Additionally, if I didn't have a business account and if he wasn't a chill guy, I may not have ever gotten my files back.
Google is raising the price of their business accounts because they're forcing planet-destroying AI features on us, so I already wanted to stop using Gmail for my business.
I made a ProtonMail account, and I'm happy to pay them for storage. ProtonMail claims it doesn't have access to your files; everything is encrypted, which makes it more appropriate for me to use for my business anyway.
And first I was bummed that they don't have an equivalent to Google Sheets, but they actually do! You can just build your own sheets straight in a doc:
It'll take time and effort to extract myself as much as possible from Google, but I'm sure it'll be worth it. So far so good.
