Quotidian Update 31.7.b.ix

Martha Kennedy 32 Comments

My Etsy store is doing well this Christmas. People are buying livestock guardian dog Christmas cards like, uh, I dunno. I just break even on them, but it’s a lovely thing when someone who has, and loves, a livestock guardian dog like Bear wants to send pictures of them on the holidays. Life is a strange, strange, strange thing. Back when they were asking me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I NEVER would have said, “I want to make livestock guardian dog Christmas cards for people and sell them from an online store!”

Yesterday most of the messages in my gmail inbox vanished. And, though I didn’t notice it immediately, all of my folders were also emptied into the Trash. Just in case you ever need to know this, there is no way to contact Google directly. I learned this can happen in two ways (not including user error). Sometimes an update will do that. Sometimes someone has hacked your gmail account. I spent some time deleting passwords from websites I haven’t even thought about in more than 10 years and changing other passwords, but I don’t think there was hackage going on.

I recently “upgraded” to Mac OS Big Sur. At this point, I’m pretty sure that was the culprit. ALL of my folders and in box were dumped into the Trash folder. This means my new hobby will be reconstructing my folders, thousands of messages beginning in 2007.

Well, I’d better get down to business and start moving stuff out of my gmail Trash. I hope it doesn’t take 13 years…

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2020/11/27/rdp-friday-ascertain/

32 thoughts on “Quotidian Update 31.7.b.ix”

  4. I feel your pain. When I worked for Verizon one of the calls we would get on occasion was, “I lost all my email!” Fairly often it was a glitch on our end but there was nothing we could do for them. Not only that but we weren’t allowed to admit it was out fault.

    Another problem was “I lost all my voicemail!”This was especially heartbreaking when the person had been saving a voicemail from a beloved person who had passed on for years to listen to their voice when they were feeling blue. Often this would happen when we’d upsold a customer to a fancier service but didn’t bother to mention that all their old voicemails would be lost.

    The moral of the story is to always print out any important emails. You could also forward copies to an email address on an unrelated provider. Like forwarding your Verizon email to a Google account. My solution (beyond most people’s ability) was to use a local email client to store them on my own computer and back this information up. Fortunately (or not) 99.9% of all my email is meaningless.

    You can’t print out a voicemail but you can forward important voice mails to an unrelated phone number. Like forwarding my landline voice mails to my cell phone. There are devices for recording phone conversations but that level of sophistication is beyond most people.

    And the calls from people who have recorded irreplaceable video content on their VCR and lost it, either because the DVR failed or because we upsold them to a fancier machine. Like the time I was interviewed on television for a program that will never be repeated. That’s really tough because we had no way to “save” recorded content if you have to replace or upgrade your DVR. It is possible to send video content to a computer or a recording device but that’s way beyond the ability of an average user.

    The digital age is an age of impermanent records. Unless it is something embarrassing or dangerous or a bald faced lie and then it will last forever.

  5. Oh wow. That would upset me too. There is an option in the Mail App (if you use it) to save to “On My Mac” – which keeps emails out of the cloud. I don’t know if you could forward to that from google (or open google in the app), but good luck. I don’t trust the cloud and that’s why. Otherwise an option is to save important emails as PDFs and print some of them. However…I recently saw a TV show where one of the characters said very dramatically… “everything is temporary” – still digesting that.

    • I don’t trust the cloud, either. Everything IS temporary, but as long as I’m here in temporal reality, there are some things I want to keep. It’s turned out to be a chance for me to clean out my email, though. 🙂

  8. The email fiasco is fixable, my flash drive dying wasn’t. I’m going to back everything up on the cloud and then download to a flash…Redundancy is the key. I am so glad your cards are selling – they are beautiful!

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