From December, Google will be able to suspend, and empty of their data, any accounts that have not seen any activity for two years. This concerns emails, of course, but also documents and photos.

These accounts and their contents, which Google considers as abandoned, can be deleted after two years of inactivity. Before this takes place, several notifications will be sent to the account owner, including to a recovery address if one has been entered.

Note that these new rules apply only to personal accounts, and not to those associated with companies or schools. Those who pay for Google One accounts are also not affected.

To avoid one of your accounts getting permanently deleted, the solution is simple; you just have to log in to it at least once every two years to preserve all your emails and documents. This account will then be considered as active and will not be threatened with deletion.

You will also have to log in to Google Photos at least once every two years to keep your image database safely stored online.

It is not currently possible to merge two separate Google accounts. So, to avoid any nasty surprises, it is strongly advised to back up your old content or data elsewhere and then import it to an active account.

To do so, sign in to your old account and go to Google Takeout. Select all your data to download and then copy it, service by service, to your other account. Then, you won’t have to worry about keeping the old data on Google’s servers.