I had all my Google Analytics accounts deleted (not all, just my personal ones, not the ones for a client or two). Very devastating. There's no direct e-mail for analytics support (just if you've forgotten your login).

Google directs you to their forums, where there're a few reports of people suddenly losing their analytics accounts without reason. From what I can tell, either they've "drunk deleted" (they deleted, but can't remember they did), or there's an actual glitch. I don't drink, so who knows.

Their recommendation is to restart and rebuild. I've sent an e-mail to their "I can't remember my login" support (via a form) and have been promised a response within "usually one business day."

I had about 22 sites and subsites being tracked so that's a lot of data (for me, at least). The bigger thing is the difficulty about support around this. It may be an edge condition (possibly the only way to have something deleted is by an actual deletion), but a few posts on the support forum doesn't leave me satisfied as a recourse.

I'm reconstructing my tracking items by looking through my sites and determining which sites were tracked. This time, I'm segmenting out my tracked sites - personal, business, clients - into separate Analytics accounts (UA-*'s) to (hopefully) minimize the impact of whatever caused this issue. (A stab in the dark, I know.)

It does make me wonder, tangentially, about mission-critical cloud data, though. Is there a backup for marketing/ad companies using Analytics? Google, oddly, doesn't back up the accounts and once an account is deleted it can't be recovered - all data is lost. There is a Google Analytics Data Export API, so I guess that's an option. My experience with Google APIs tells me that this one'd be pretty easy to use, but I can't fathom wanting to back up the tracking data for the "unknown unknown" use case of accounts just disappearing.

To be fair, Microsoft SQL Azure doesn't offer backups, either. Their strategy is "resiliency" - with 3 copies of each database underneath their fabric. They expose almost everything in SQL Server 2008 with the addition of the Sync Framework. Backups, they claim, aren't needed but, if you desperately want backups, use the apis and make your own. (Why not also in the cloud, they suggest?) Maybe on Amazon?

On a different note, there's a new async tracking script so the code can be placed at different spots on the page rather than just the recommended bottom.

Other posts of mine referring to Analytics and tracking