Are you looking for ways to recover your deleted Gmail account, username, or password?
This article gives all the different methods to easily recover your deleted Gmail account and its data.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
What are the Google Account Recovery Options?
How to Recover Gmail Account Password?
How to Recover Lost Gmail Username?
How to Recover a Deleted Gmail Account?
How to Recover G Suite Deleted Account, Username, and Password from Google Admin Console?
How to Recover Gmail Account Password using Google Admin Console?
How to Recover Gmail Username using Google Admin Console?
How to Restore a Recently Deleted G Suite Account?
Restore Data from Google Account When You Have a Backup
How to Restore Deleted Gmail Account Data Using Google Takeout?
What Are the Limitations of Using Google’s Native Features to Recover Google Account Data?
How to Recover Deleted Google Account Data Using Third-Party Applications?
Introduction to Gmail Account Recovery
Over the years Google expanded its services from Gmail to others like Drive, Photos, Contacts, Calendar, Documents and so on. There are over 40 readily available applications and one Google account to rule them all.
This – one account policy – makes it easy to manage all the applications and have access to any new application that Google may release. But, this also means that if you lose or delete your Gmail account then you lose all your data stored across these applications.
Google, in its Terms and Conditions clearly states that they will not take responsibility for any data loss due to user negligence and malicious activity.
Have you accidentally deleted your Gmail account? Let’s look at all the ways in which you can reactivate your Google account.
What are the Google Account Recovery Options?
If you are unable to access your Google account it might be due to the following three reasons:
1. Lost username
2. Lost password
3. Account deletion
As Google does not usually delete accounts due to inactivity, you have a lot of time to try and remember the username and password you lost/forgotten. But, if you deleted your whole Google account then you have very limited days to change your mind!
Don’t have time to read the whole article? Download the PDF.
How to Recover Gmail Account Password?
If you forgot the password to your account, Google will help you regain access by sending you to the create new password page; but only after confirming your identity.
- Step 1: Open the Google sign-in/Account recovery page and click on the link “Forgot password”.
- Step 2: Enter the last password you remember using with this account.
If you don’t remember any previous passwords then move onto the next question. Google – provided you have added your phone to the account – will now send a prompt to your phone to verify your identity.
- Step 3: Tap ‘yes’ on the phone and then select the number displayed on the computer.
This will directly send you to “create a new password” page, after which you can log in to your account.
If you haven’t added your phone, then select ‘Try another way’. Next, Google will send a verification code as a text message on the phone number you provided during account creation.
- Step 4: Enter the verification code sent to your phone.
If this doesn’t work either, then move onto the next step.
- Step 5: Answer the security question to confirm your identity.
If not, move on to the next step.
- Step 6: Enter the verification code sent to your recovery email address.
Upon verifying your identity, Google will send you to the “create a new password” page.
Additional steps for a G Suite Administrator if all previous steps did not work:
If you did not set up a device for verification during account setup, then Google will ask you to add a CNAME (Canonical name) to your domain’s DNS records for verification.
- Step 7: Open a new tab and sign in to your domain host’s site.
- Step 8: Navigate to the Domain’s DNS records, and add a code that Google provides as the label and Google.com as the destination.
- Step 9: Save the changes and return to the account recovery page and click next.
You will be asked to provide an alternate email address for them to contact you once they have verified your CNAME.
- Step 10: Provide the email address for Google to contact you back and click “Next”.
- Google will now verify the CNAME you provided and get back to you within 72 hours. If you want to know more about creating a CNAME visit Google support page.
How to Recover Lost Gmail Username?
Before retrieving your username, Google will ask a few questions to confirm if the account belongs to you. Answer these questions to the best of your capabilities to get your credentials back.
- Step 1: Open the Google sign-in/Account recovery page and click on the “Forgot email” link.
- Step 2: Enter the recovery email or phone number associated with the account.
Once you have given the email/phone number, Google will ask your first and last name that was specified with the Google account that you are trying to recover.
- Step 3: Enter your First and Last name.
If the information you provided was correct, Google will send a verification code to the email address/phone number you provided.
- Step 4: Enter the verification code that was sent, and click on “Next”.
Google will now show all the accounts that are associated with the recovery information you provided.
- Step 5: Choose your account and type in the password to sign in.
How to Recover a Deleted Gmail Account?
- Step 1: Open the Google Sign-in/Account recovery page and enter your email address.
- Step 2: Click on the “Next” button.
(Google will show this option only if your account is still recoverable. If Google says it cannot find an account with this email address, that means it’s too late and you cannot recover your account.) - Step 3: Enter the last password you remember using with this account.
If you get this right, then you can directly sign in to your account. If not, then move on to the next step. - Step 4: You will receive a text or call on the phone number that you linked with the account during account creation.
If you did not set up a phone number then move on to step 5. - Step 5: Enter the verification code that was sent to your recovery email address.
- Step 6: Select the month and year in which you created the account.
If none of these steps work, then Google will ask you to give them another email address to contact you. They will get back to you after trying to verify your identity.
How to Recover G Suite Deleted Account, Username, and Password from Google Admin Console?
G Suite administrators can easily recover and reset an individual G Suite user’s username, password, and recently deleted account from the Google Admin Console.
How to Recover Gmail Account Password using Google Admin Console?
Administrators can always reset a G Suite user account password from the Google Admin Console.
- Step 1: Log in to Google Admin Console.
- Step 2: Navigate to “Users” and click on the option “Add a filter” and select the option “First name” or “Last name” from the drop-down menu.
Step 3: Hover over the desired user and select the option “Reset password”.
- Step 4: Create a new password and click “Reset”.
- Step 5: Share the new password with the user.
How to Recover Gmail Username using Google Admin Console?
G Suite administrators can always recover lost account usernames from the Google Admin Console.
- Step 1: Log in to Google Admin Console.
- Step 2: Navigate to “Users” and click “Add filters” option.
- Step 3: Select an appropriate filter to search for the user as shown below,
The username would be visible next to the name.
- Step 4: Share the username with the user.
How to Restore a Recently Deleted G Suite Account?
Super administrators can recover a deleted user in G Suite within 20 days of deletion. After 20 days all the data associated with that account will be permanently deleted from Google’s servers and cannot be recovered by any means.
- Step 1: Log in to Google Admin Console with super-admin credentials.
- Step 2: Click on the option “Users”.
- Step 3: Go to “Users” and click on the “+ add filter” option.
- Step 4: Select the option “recently deleted” from the drop-down menu.
- Step 5: Hover over the desired user and click on the “Restore” button.
- Step 6: Review and click on the “Continue” button.
- Step 7: Select the desired organizational unit and click “Recover”.
Recovering a G Suite administrator account is similar to recovering a G Suite user account, apart from a few additional steps. This is because to delete an admin account you have to first remove their admin role.
Follow the same steps to recover the deleted user account and then give them the admin role again if you want that account to be an administrator.
To know how to make a G Suite user an administrator click here.
These methods work well when you need to gain access to your account or restore a deleted user account within a few days. But, what if you exceeded the 20-day limit? Or what if you just wanted to restore a particular service, folder, or file instead of the whole account?
In such situations, taking a backup of your Google account data assures safety as well as flexible data restoration.
Restore Data from Google Account When You Have a Backup
If you had already taken a backup of your Google account then you can easily restore the data back to a new account in case of account deletion, or recover just the necessary data to an existing account.
In this section, you will learn how to restore Google account data using Google’ native feature (Google Takeout) and a third-party application (SysCloud).
How to Restore Deleted Gmail Account Data Using Google Takeout?
Google Takeout is an in-built Google feature that lets you download your account data to hardware. If you had regularly downloaded your data using Google Takeout, then you can restore it to a newly created Google account in case your account was permanently deleted.
Read our blog articles to know more about using Google Takeout to recover deleted Gmail emails and recover deleted Google Drive files. You can also use the same method to restore your downloaded Google Calendar, Bookmarks, Sites, Contacts, and 40+ other applications.
If you want to know more about using Google Takeout to backup your data then read our blog post, How to Use Google Takeout for Business (Step-By-Step Guide).
What Are the Limitations of Using Google’s Native Features to Recover Google Account Data?
- Limited time to recover data: Administrators can only recover a deleted user within 20 days while personal Google account users have even less time to undelete their accounts.
- Possible Data loss: Google Takeout requires you to regularly download the data failing to do so will result in huge data loss.
- Not business-friendly: Native data restoration methods are not feasible for businesses as it relies solely on individual users to backup their data, or does not come handy in large data loss events.
- No direct data restoration: You cannot directly recover your Google account data using Google Takeout or other native features. You will have to use additional tools and email clients to recover.
- Incomplete restoration: Native features does not restore your data with sharing permissions and folder structure intact.
- Limited selective recovery options: These features let you restore data as a whole or with very limited filtering. This might cause you to restore data that you didn’t want.
How to Recover Deleted Google Account Data Using Third-Party Applications?
Third-party applications like SysCloud takes regular backup of your data and stores it safely in the cloud. SysCloud provides automated cloud to cloud backup and restore, where your data can be stored for an unlimited period. It is an effective and reliable solution to effortlessly recover lost account data during a crisis.
SysCloud offers a cross-user restore option to restore data from one Google account to another. This feature helps you to easily restore data from the deleted account to a new account with all sharing permissions and folder structure intact.
Here are the steps to recover a permanently deleted Google account using SysCloud:
- Step1: Create a new Google account for recovery if you want to recover the entire account data, or if you just want to restore specific files or folders then you can use an existing account.
- Step 2: Log in to your SysCloud account with your admin credentials.
Step 3: Navigate to the “Backup” option in the menu bar and select the “Archive & Restore” option from the drop-down menu.
- Step 4: Search for the user account that you want to recover.Once you click on the username you will see all the services – like Google Drive, Contacts, Calendar, and Sites – that have been backed up.
- Step 5: Select a service that you want to recover and select all files.
- Step 6: Click on the “Restore” button on the top left of the page and select the “All” option from the drop-down menu to restore all the files in that service.You will now be asked to specify the account to which you want to restore the data.
- Step 7: Provide the new account name and select “Restore”.All data in the selected service will now be restored to the specified Google account.
- Step 8: Repeat the same steps for all the services – like Google Drive, Contacts, Calendar, and Sites – to restore entire data to the new Google account.
Try SysCloud’s Backup Solution
