How not to lose all the data of old inactive Google accounts

(ETX Daily Up) – Starting in December 2023, Google will be able to suspend and delete data from any account that hasn’t had any activity for two years. This concerns e-mails of course, but also documents and photos. Find out how to protect yourself from a nasty surprise about accounts and data you haven’t consulted in a while.

These accounts and their content, which Google then considers abandoned, could then be deleted after two years of inactivity. Before reaching this end, several notifications will be sent, including to a recovery address if reported. Also note that these new rules only apply to personal accounts and not those associated with businesses or schools. Also, those who have a paid Google One account are not affected.

To prevent one day one of your accounts from being permanently deleted, it’s very simple, you just need to connect to it at least once every two years to keep all your emails and documents. This account will then be considered active and in no way threatened with deletion. You will also need to connect to Google Photos at least once every two years to keep its database of images carefully stored online.

It is now impossible to merge two separate Google accounts. Therefore, to avoid unpleasant surprises, it is strongly recommended to save your old data elsewhere and then export it to an active account. Log in to your old account and go to Google Takeout. Select all of your data to download and then copy it service by service to your other account. So you no longer have to worry about whether or not this old data is kept on Google’s servers.