03-01-2011, 06:35 PM
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Confirmed User
Industry Role:
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Ontario
Posts: 4,235
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Google has a TAPE backup of all of Gmail
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web...und/index.html
Quote:
Google still stores e-mail data on tape.
Yes, tape. Like, essentially the technology behind the cassette. Google doesn't specify what kind of tape it's using exactly, but as Seth Weintraub notes on a blog on the CNN partner site Fortune.com, using tape is a mess.
Weintraub estimates Google would need 200,000 tapes to make a single backup of every Gmail account. "That is a stack of tapes four kilometers high to back up Gmail," he writes. "Ouch."
The blog Data Center Knowledge, however, says tape is still a worthy method of backing up data, even if it seems obsolete to outsiders:
"Even today, tape has two significant advantages over other media: cost and portability. Unfortunately, these two advantages outweigh the more significant (logically speaking) disadvantages of tape media: fragility, replacement rate, failure rate, vulnerability to theft, and unencrypted data storage."
Google puts it this way:
"To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they'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's taken us hours to get the e-mail back instead of milliseconds."
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Pretty crazy that they can backup everything on to tapes!!
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