Gmail Accounts To Be Recovered From Tape
To restore the Gmail accounts it lost at the weekend, Google is going to its tape backup
Many thousands of Gmail users who lost all their messages on Sunday should be getting them back shortly, according to Google, thanks to the company’s tape backup.
Hundreds of thousands of users found that up to seven years of their Gmail archives had disappeared on Sunday, when an update to Google’s storage software went wrong. Google has had to go trawling through offline tape back-ups in order to find the lost data, but has promised to restore old emails.
‘Tape backup rules’
The problem involved a “storage software update”, said a Google blog post. This “caused 0.02 percent of Gmail users to temporarily lose access to their email,” the post said, and when the problem was discovered the update was halted and Google reverted to the old version of its software – albeit losing many people’s entire email archive in the process.
“I know what some of you are thinking: how could this happen if we have multiple copies of your data, in multiple data centers?” the blog asks, giving the answer that “in some rare instances software bugs can affect several copies of the data”.
Having discovered that mails were deleted, Google went to its tape back-up library. “Since the tapes are offline, they’re protected from such software bugs,” said the blog. “But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it’s taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds.”
Tape is a much-maligned medium, referred to by some as a dinosaur, and used by EMC in a stunt to create the world’s largest tape ball. However, most serious vendors expect it to stick around. Hewlett-Packard sees a future in tape, and EMC predicts it will last till 2020.
On the basis of Google’s experience, there is still a vast amount of value in tape. Roger Luethy, a storage Specialist with IBM in Switzerland commented simply, on his Storage CH blog: “Tape rules!”
