alt Hacker NewsI suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) related to an e-bike accident two years ago. I woke up in the ICU after a short coma-like thing and the nurses/doctors asking me questions and it was clear I was answering for the 10th time or more, like we had all done this before, but I couldn't remember anything.
Thankfully my very long password I use for an encrypted Borgbackup I have was somewhere deep or untouched, but, otherwise I would have been fucked. Also, the backup codes Google told me they would always accept failed and it wasn't until I found a random unused Android device in a drawer that had been unused for a year was I able to get access back to my Google account of ~25 years.
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I also had old Google backup codes fail a few years ago. Anybody who hasn't regenerated them in a year or two, I recommend you do so.
my stomach turned into a knot just reading your story. I know that feel of waking up surrounded by nurses not knowing what happened. I'm so glad you had proper backups!!!!!!!!!!
this exact story is why i built my app, thank you so much for sharing.
my hope is to basically make a next version of your plan that's distributed among friends.
Wow, it both surprises me but also makes me feel justified in that I keep telling people to make backups of things they care about including something like a Spotify account (if your song lists are dear to them, at least the titles and other metadata that they could rebuild from) and other "cloud" or SaaS services. Anything one cares about, back it up! (Not to you but as a PSA)
Still, it's weird that Google doesn't accept a recovery code. Then again, I had a similar issue where I had nothing set up but a recovery email address and password (back when 2FA was rare), and after confirming both, Google said "well, we still think it's suspicious, why don't you use a device where you're already logged in" (my account had no active sessions that I knew of, besides that I was traveling). Luckily I didn't need it for anything as I had my email moved away already at that time. I still can't access that account today and I switched to throwaway accounts for things like youtube comments or app downloads from the play store (need to download that government authentication software somehow...)
Did Google specifically reject the recovery code as invalid, or did it accept all entries and then their algorithm rejected the login outright?