{"id":285535,"date":"2011-03-01T10:59:45","date_gmt":"2011-03-01T10:59:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ghanamma.net\/2011\/03\/01\/how-google-got-lost-emails-back\/"},"modified":"2011-03-01T10:59:45","modified_gmt":"2011-03-01T10:59:45","slug":"how-google-got-lost-emails-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/01\/how-google-got-lost-emails-back\/","title":{"rendered":"How Google got lost emails back"},"content":{"rendered":"<div readability=\"65.1070874289\">\n<p><strong>I wasn&#8217;t even aware they still used tape backups.<\/strong><\/p>\n<div><a href=\"http:\/\/fortunebrainstormtech.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/02\/datachamplg.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-52984\" title=\"Datachamplg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ghanamma.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/413abc02atachamplg.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"186\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>lots of these needed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>This <a href=\"http:\/\/tech.fortune.cnn.com\/2011\/02\/28\/gmail-outage-passes-24-hours-for-some\/\">particular Gmail outage<\/a> is proving to be particularly bad, at least for the .02% of Gmail users affected. \u00a0However, it appears the end in site for Google. \u00a0In a post on the Gmail Blog Google\u00a0(<a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/quote\/quote.html?symb=GOOG\">GOOG<\/a>)\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/gmailblog.blogspot.com\/2011\/02\/gmail-back-soon-for-everyone.html\">reveals<\/a> that it has had to go to tape backups and expect to finish restoring accounts in the coming hours.<\/p>\n<blockquote readability=\"11\">\n<p>To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they&#8217;re protected from such software bugs. But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it&#8217;s taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Tape?<span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>I had no idea that Google was still backing up its data with tape. \u00a0I had assumed that Google&#8217;s backups were done to disks in different parts of the world. \u00a0Doing tape backups, even automated ones, is much more labor, space, energy, and obviously time intensive than disks.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, having dealt with (relatively) small libraries of data stored on tape that filled up rooms, it is hard for me to imagine that Google is actually using tape. \u00a0Looking at the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Linear_Tape-Open\">ol&#8217; LTO Wikipedia Page<\/a>, the current high density tape is 1.5Tb uncompressed. \u00a0Assuming that each of the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gmail\">200 million<\/a> Gmail users use a little over 1GB each, that means Google needs about 200,000 tapes to store all of that data.<\/p>\n<p>Once. \u00a0It is hopefully\u00a0making\u00a0incremental backups which take more space.<\/p>\n<p>How many is 200,000 tapes? \u00a0Again assuming LTO 2+cm depth times 200,000 tapes, that is a <strong>stack of tapes four kilometers high<\/strong> to back up Gmail. \u00a0Ouch.<\/p>\n<p>No wonder it is taking 30 hours \u2013 but thankfully it can be done at all.\u00a0Stay tuned for a\u00a0postmortem\u00a0from Google shortly.<\/p>\n<p>More on Fortune:<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span><\/span><span><\/span><span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ghanamma.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/413abc02atachamplg-150x150.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Continued here:<br \/>\n<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/rss.cnn.com\/~r\/rss\/money_topstories\/~3\/O357cvt9PfY\/\" title=\"How Google got lost emails back\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">How Google got lost emails back<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p> I wasn&#8217;t even aware they still used tape backups. lots of these needed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-285535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.0 - 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