Google recovers wiped Emails from tape

[steve2470]

http://spinport.com/google-recovers-wiped-emails-from-tape/315177/

By Sunil Chawla – March 1, 2011

Google issued an apology to users whose inboxes were accidentally wiped. Many reported that their contacts were also deleted. Google said emails were not lost and everything should return to normal soon. A delay occurred because a backup was restored from tape.

The headline on CNN ran “Google nukes thousands of Gmail accounts.” One user wrote on Gmail’s help forum that ten years of emails were lost, while another claimed six. One lamented that if the problem were not rectified, he would lost “the main record of the last 7 years of my life.”

Google said only 0.02% of customers were struck, after earlier estimating it was under 0.08%. But since there are 170 million Gmail customers, that is a goodly number of people.. 170 million is an estimate, as Google has not released official figures.

Ben Treynor, head of site reliability for Google, said that while there are multiple copies of data in multiple data centers, in rare cases bugs can infect several copies of data, and that happened in this case.

[NYC_SKP]

1. I wouldn't have much sympathy for anyone who relied on a free service to store years of vital data

Which is why I use a backup email client for my two most important email accounts, and it stores the inboxes on the hard disk, in case the servers ever vaporize.

:P

Good article, K and R.

[cynatnite]

2. I use google for my primary email address...

I also save important attachments and whatnot to my external hard drive, too. I've lost stuff too many times to risk keeping it all in one place like that.