Despite the popular saying, lightning does strike twice, or even four times — as it did at a Google data center in Belgium last Thursday, causing problems for the next several days and leading to permanent data loss for a small percentage of unlucky users.
The problem began when the facility lost power briefly during one of the late-summer thunderstorms common in the area. That caused problems with reading or writing data for about five percent of disks in the data center. Most were fixed but data on .000001% of the center’s total disk space was lost. “In these cases, full recovery is not possible,” the company said in a statement.
WTF, Google doesn’t have backups? And people trust them with data in Google Docs?
Source: Google Lost Data After Lightning Hit Its Data Center in Belgium – Fortune
Oh, hehehehehe. Now I highly suspect if my gmail account is completely gone, or some mails become completely not readable.
Oh, hehehehehe. Now I highly suspect if my gmail account is completely gone, or some mails become completely not readable.
Google makes lots of backups; IIRC they not only make backups using different devices on different media to avoid issues specific to a given type of device, they also are continually picking random backups to check. I think what was lost here was what had changed since the last backup in the last hour or 12 hours or whatever.
Google makes lots of backups; IIRC they not only make backups using different devices on different media to avoid issues specific to a given type of device, they also are continually picking random backups to check. I think what was lost here was what had changed since the last backup in the last hour or 12 hours or whatever.