Protect Your SMB From Gmail Outages - Backup Offline

Tape backup which many SMBs have abandoned in favor of online or disk-based systems may even be an appropriate solution for backing up cloud-stored data offline, Paul Mah says.

"One corner of Google's vast cloud skipped a beat over the weekend, resulting in the deletion of e-mail messages belonging to some Gmail users. Estimates of affected users varies, with Google quick to emphasize that the affected accounts range from an initial 0.08 percent to a later revised 0.02 percent of all Gmail users. Nobody has a concrete figure at this point (and Google will probably never say), though with an estimated 170 million users, I think it is fair to say that affected Gmail users could only number in the tens of thousands.

The root of the issue appears to be a software bug in a recently released storage software update that inadvertently corrupted and deleted e-mails belonging to a number of Gmail users. While Google says that the presence of backup meant that no e-mail was lost, there are a couple of lessons that we can learn from a quick examination of this episode."