I lost my hotmail account I had for years due to losing my phone number. My boss at one point said he would pay for me to have a cell phone, not for work purposes or to contact me just as a perk of working there hey here is a personal cell phone on me so you don't have to pay for one. All good and he let me get the first iphone that came to Canada the 3g and it was awesome. Left that job years later and didn't think far ahead enough that I needed that phone number to get into my account should I have an issue. Well I did and tried all the recovery methods with no luck. Sad thing is I still get occasional emails forwarded from that account, haven't seen one in a long while but was still getting them for years. Hurts a lot to have lost it. The screw up that compounded my loss was I guess I was paranoid about giving my personal information online back in the day. So my name I used was John Fokendoe. And some made up birthday. So I could not remember all the info I entered and years and years lost. For my google I downloaded the backup codes in Case I lose access to my phone. They sit in a folder safe and there if I ever need to recover the account.