Two days after tens of thousands of Google Gmail users discovered their e-mail, chat histories and contacts had disappeared from their accounts, the problem still is not fixed.Google announced Monday night that the Gmail issue, which struck some users on Sunday, was caused by a bug in a storage software update. While Google had said Monday afternoon that the issue would be resolved for all users within 12 hours, the company now says that the problem has not been fixed but hopes it will be “soon.”
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The good news is that Google reported that users’ e-mails, contacts, folders and settings have not been lost. They are retrievable and should be back in users’ accounts once the problem is resolved.
“Imagine the sinking feeling of logging in to your Gmail account and finding it empty,” wrote Ben Treynor, a Google vice president engineering and Site Reliability Czar, in a blog post . “That’s what happened to 0.02% of Gmail users yesterday, and we’re very sorry. The good news is that email was never lost and we’ve restored access for many of those affected. Though it may take longer than we originally expected, we’re making good progress and things should be back to normal for everyone soon.”
The number of users affected has varied. At first, the company estimated that 0.08%, or 150,000 users had been affected. Later Monday, Google reduced that estimate to 0.02%, or 35,000.
On Monday afternoon, a Google spokesman told Computerworld that engineers had restored service to about a third of those affected.
In his blog Monday night, Treynor addressed the question of how this could happen if Google has multiple copies of users’ data in multiple data centers.
“Well, in some rare instances software bugs can affect several copies of the data,” Treynor wrote. “That’s what happened here. Some copies of mail were deleted, and we’ve been hard at work over the last 30 hours getting it back for the people affected by this issue.”
He added that engineers have also archived to tape in order to save the data.
“To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape,” he said. “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 email back instead of milliseconds.”
Treynor said a detailed incident report will be posted to Google’s Apps Status Dashboard .
It’s Not Just Google Services You Need to Worry About
However, it’s not just Gmail and other Webmail services that are the problem; we’re increasingly using cloud-based tools for work and communication such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Docs, Microsoft Office Live, Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, Posterous, Flickr, Picasa, and on and on.
But that doesn’t mean you should forego a solid back-up plan for all your online data. If the worst ever does happen, and a free Web service dumps your stuff permanently, the only response you can reasonably expect from these companies is: “oops, sorry.”
With that in mind here are a few suggestions on how to add an extra layer of security in case the cloud lets you down one day.
Gmail and Friends
The easiest way to create a local back up of your e-mail is to use a basic POP3/IMAP e-mail client such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple’s Mail app, or Windows Live Mail. If you don’t like using an e-mail client for daily use and prefer to use the Web interface instead, just fire up your desktop program on a regular schedule. Even if you launch your desktop client once a month, you will at least have the bulk of your mail stored offline.
Facebook recently launched a handy feature that lets you export almost all of your Facebook data into a handy ZIP file. All you have to do is visit Facebook’s export tool and click the download button. Then you’ll get an e-mail when your file is ready to download to your desktop. This is an ideal task to do once a month or even once every season. You don’t want to lose all those mobile uploads should the worst happen, and it makes it much easier to move your data around should you wish to leave Facebook one day.
Blogging
The best way to save all the hard work you put into your blog posts is to save them on your hard drive before posting them to the cloud. Many blog writing programs are compatible with the most popular blogging platforms such as Blogger, WordPress, or Tumblr. Mac users can use a blog writing program such as MarsEdit ($39.95), which saves a back-up of every blog post you write using the app. For Windows users, Microsoft’s free Windows Live Writer will save your posts written using the program to a file in your Documents folder called “My Weblog Posts.” Most blog services also have an export feature to download all the posts you’ve already written.
You could subscribe to your own Twitter feed using a desktop RSS reader such as NetNewsWire for Mac or FeedDemon for Windows. But most desktop programs limit how many items you can download via RSS. Another option is to try a free service such as TweetBackup and Tweet Scan Backup, which let you grab your past tweets and export them to your desktop. Keep in mind these services can only grab a chunk of your most recent tweets (Tweet Scan Backup only grabs 1000). If you tweet more than that or are coming close to that limit, make sure you back it up before all your 140-character witticisms are inaccessible.
Backing-up your data may be a pain, but if you want to maintain control while still enjoying Web-based services you owe it to yourself to back up your stuff locally.