Restoring lost 40,000 Google Gmail account

By Rosa Rosa Golijan

At this moment there are 40,000 Gmail users whose accounts are basically lost — their email and contacts are simply disappeared. He's going to be okay, though, because Google has backup tapes of old school and use them to restore the missing data.

TechCrunch reports that Google's propensity to have some "mad data redundancy policies," which apparently include tape backups online, everything must be restored soon, and Google confirms this report in a post on his official blog of Gmail.

The search engine giant explains that the problem started with a "storage" software update that caused unexpected a "bug", which in turn has resulted in the loss of data:

I know that some of you are thinking: how could this happen if we have multiple copies of your data across multiple data centers? Well, in some cases rare software bug can affect different copies of data. What happened here. Some copies of mail have been removed, and we've been hard at work over the last few hours returning to those affected by this problem.

To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back up to tape. Since tapes are offline, you're protected from these software bugs. But also restore data from them requires more than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it has taken hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds.

A detailed diagram of these events along with an explanation of how Google will avoid similar problems in future Status will be published on the dashboard Apps soon, but meanwhile there is something that has affected users should keep in mind:

If you have been affected by this problem, it is important to note that the email sent to you between 6: 00 PM PST on February 27 and 2: 00 PM PST on February 28, was probably not delivered to the mailbox, and the sender would receive a notification that has not been delivered their messages.

There are about 200 million users of Gmail, then 40,000 is roughly .02 percent of accounts involved.

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Rosa Rosa Golijan writes tech here and there. She is a little obsessed with Twitter, but still loves be liked on Facebook.