In most cases, accounts are disabled because of a perceived violation of either the Google Terms of Service or product-specific Terms of Service.

Google reserves the right to:

• Suspend a Google Account from using a particular product or the entire Google Accounts system if the Terms of Service or product-specific policies are violated.
• Terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.

If your Google Account has been disabled, please review the relevant Terms of Service before attempting to create another account. For guidelines on a specific Google product, please visit the product homepage for a link to its Terms of Service.

Of course I hardly ever read the full TOS like everyone else. But I am very white hat and don’t do any thing bad on the Google products I use. In fact I recently got an offer from Google to become a partner on YouTube.

Google’s form asked me to select my country and then enter my mobile phone number which I did for my iphone – but I never got the code to enter. So I tried my wife’s cell number and she got the text message right away so then I entered the 5 or 6 digit code and BAM I was logged back in to all my Google products. Now I am scared sh*tless that it is going to happen again.

Two things come to mind: 1. Wow, I have a lot of info with Google. I can’t have this happen because how will I get to all my data like Analytics? 2. How can I backup so if this happens again I can protect myself?

Here are all my account that I was locked out from.

1. Account – my account is shared between 2 addresses one of them is a gmail account. My account is even Verified.
2. Alerts – 11 active
3. Analytics – 9 websites. Couldn’t log on.
4. Blogger – 1 site
5. Calendar – Couldn’t log on.
6. Checkout
7. Contacts – 182 entries. Couldn’t log on.
8. Custom Search – 1
9. Docs – 2 documents. Couldn’t log on.
10. Gmail – 293 conversations. Couldn’t log on.
11. Google Sync – 1 device configured iphone
12. IGoogle – 16 gadgets
13. Picasa Web Albums – 11 images
14. Google Video – 9 videos
15. Profile – 18 entries. When I went to look at it from a ‘Dave Dugdale’ search it said Prohibited.
16. Reader – 67 items. Couldn’t log on.
17. Talk – 0
18. Tasks -1
19. Voice
20. Web History – Disabled
21. YouTube – 191 public. I could see all my videos still online, i just couldn’t log on.
22. Google Groups
23. Google News
24. Google Wave
25. Google Webmaster Tools – Couldn’t log on. Once I logged in there where no messages for me.
26. Knol

Interesting side note that when this happened YouTube was undergoing some maintenance.

Also I did find this topic useful on Google Groups regarding Gmail.

Sending a large number of undeliverable messages (messages that bounce back).

I do get several bounce backs a day because my system sends out many email alerts for new housing rentals. Perhaps this is the cause.

Also read about this guy that got his account reinstated 2 days later.