▲ 18 points

The danger of using Gmail as storage

by lentil_soup·11y ago·11 comments·view on hn ↗

I have an old .rar file with some important documents + an .exe file I need. It allowed me to send it last year and I left it there for storage. Fast forward to today, they changed the rules and now block any .rar file with .exes inside. This means my files are there but are blocked and inaccessible to me.

This is a reminder of the danger of trusting our data to 3rd parties and who actually is in control of it.

11 comments

Created this account just to help you :)

I was in the same situation last week - I needed an old file that was inside a .rar archive, and gmail wouldn't let me download it. I knew about google takeout, but i didn't wat to download several gigs just for that one file, so this is what i ended up doing:

1) In Gmail, create a label (any name will do, like "rar export");

2) Add the message google won't let you download attachments from to this label;

3) Go to google.com/settings/takeout, and look for the option which lets you export a single label from Gmail.

Hope it helps :)

Wow! You are a flying unicorn angel of light! Thank you so much :) ... HN is such a great community

I foolishly relied on Google to store my travel itinerary (confirmation emails, mostly), which worked fine until I needed to confirm a hotel reservation in Beijing, where Gmail is blocked by the Great Firewall.

Google has been blocking archives with exe files since around 2005, rar was just one of the few formats they didn't scan inside of so this is hardly a surprise.

Does IMAP allow you access?

What about google.com/takeout?

Indeed, IMAP probably works in this case. Hopefuly, the lesson has been learnt: gmail isn't a backup provider.

> This is a reminder of the danger of trusting our data to 3rd parties and who actually is in control of it.

Not really. It's a reminder that you should keep backups and test them. If your only copy is in gmail, you don't have a backup.

A good reason to always throw a password on archives.

At least with .rar files you can still see the list of files in the archive even if it's password protected.

I think he meant to say "A good reason to encrypt your archives", not just put a password on them. If you encrypt your archive, even a rar, gmail shouldn't be able to see the contents inside of it.

Another solution is to simply change executable names to .exe.backup or something similar, that way it'll register as a ".backup" extension for most systems and not be blocked simply by name (though this wouldn't necessarily defeat things that actually detect and block binary executables).

Password protect your compressed files. Problems Solved

Check the box to encrypt file names and they can't scan inside rars.

Thanks for this post. I won't be storing any exe/rar files in my gmail account.