I have a domain, and thought it would be cool to have an email in my domain,e.g. devpapa@devpapa.com. So I used private email from Namecheap. It's cheap, nothing fancy, costs $15 per year. It was great, until it was time to renew.

I live in Africa and the exchange rate to the dollar is atrocious. I don't earn a lot so I considered it was not a priority at this time to renew that $15 a year for my fancy domain email. I let it expire.

I had been accessing it on my phone through Gmail. Once Gmail could no longer reach the servers it started bugging me to re-authenticate. I ignored it for a while but Gmail can be persistent and annoying about these things so I decided to delete the account from my Gmail client on my phone. There, no more annoying notification to reconnect to a service I can no longer afford.

Imagine my surprise when 2 minutes later, I get the same notification. Wait, what? Didn't I delete you? What's going on...oh crap! I deleted my other Gmail account. The one where most of my accounts are tied to. Well no big deal, first delete the annoying, expired email for real this time and then sign in again to my Gmail.

So I go to Gmail, sign in and it asks me to approve the sign in on my phone, but nothing shows. So I say, sign in another way, then it asks for my backup code. I usually print them but for the life of my I could not locate the backup code for this account. Minor panic. Heart racing. Have I been locked out of my account?

At this point I'm still signed in on my work laptop so I try disable 2FA but it asks for that blasted code. I check in the security setting and discover one of my old devices is still connected to the account. I had decommissioned it because the screen is broken and the battery had swelled up for the second time. It's slow, doesn't hold a charge and is running an ancient version of Android. But could it save me? Could it get me back into my account?

So I got home, connected the battery again, power it, opened Gmail and there it was. My account. I logged in to the account on my laptop, it requested I approve the sign in notification on the old device, I did that and voila, I was in, on my laptop. It works. Now to try on my phone. Signed in on my phone, authenticated on the old device and I was in. Crisis averted.

This wouldn't have happened if I had the backup code handy, so I copied that and saved it, then saved it somewhere I can have access to it from anywhere.

It makes me worry, what would happen if I lose my phone and laptop at the same time, would I have access to any of my online accounts? With 2FA you really need to keep those backup codes secure otherwise it's sayonara online account.

Anyways crisis averted, I'm in again, thanks to my old junky phone.