I’m really confused and worried about what happened to my Google account. When I logged in today, I noticed everything was missing from my Gmail inbox. All important emails have vanished completely. Even worse, my Google Docs files and presentations are gone too.
The strangest part is that it seems a new account was created automatically. My original account is now showing a name format like “[email protected]” instead of my usual email address.
I never asked for any changes to my account or agreed to any migration. This situation is really stressing me out because I had years of important emails and documents stored there. Has anyone else faced a similar issue? I’m not sure if this is a recovery problem or something else going wrong with Google.
Any help would be greatly appreciated as I really need to recover my data!
oh man this happend to me too! check if you can access your old stuff by going to takeout.google.com first - sometimes the data is still there even when the account looks weird. also try logging out completly and back in, might just be a display glitch with the new interface google rolled out recently.
I experienced something very similar about two years ago and understand the panic you’re feeling right now. What likely happened is your university implemented a domain policy change or account restructuring without proper notification. The “olddata” prefix is a telltale sign of an automated backup process that Google uses during institutional account transitions. Your original data should still exist in Google’s systems but may be temporarily inaccessible due to the account restructuring. I recommend checking if you can still access your old account by trying to log in with your original credentials at accounts.google.com and looking for any account switching options in the top right corner. Also try searching for any emails from Google Workspace Admin or your university IT department from the past few weeks that might have mentioned this change. Sometimes these notifications end up in spam folders. The good news is that in most cases like this, the data recovery is possible once you work with the right support channels.
This sounds like you might have been affected by an institutional account migration or consolidation process. Universities and organizations sometimes migrate user accounts to new systems without much warning, which can cause the exact symptoms you’re describing. The fact that your email now shows the ‘olddata’ prefix suggests this was likely an automated migration where your old account was archived and a new one was provisioned. I went through something similar when my company switched email providers and it was terrifying at first. Your data probably isn’t actually lost but rather moved to an archived state. Contact your university’s IT support immediately and mention the account name change - they should be able to restore access to your original data or explain the migration process. Don’t panic yet, institutional migrations usually have recovery procedures in place.