Gmail accidentally resetting accounts, years of correspondence vanish

Gmail accidentally resetting accounts, years of correspondence vanish into the cloud?

If you've got a working Gmail account, you might want to back it up every so often -- as many as 500,000 Gmail users lost access to their inboxes this morn, and some of them are reporting (via Twitter and support forums) that years worth of messages, attachments and Google Chat logs had vanished by the time they were finally able to log on. While we haven't experienced the issue personally, we're hearing that the bug effectively reset some accounts, treating their owners as new users complete with welcome messages. For its part, Google says that the issue "affects less than .29% of the Google Mail userbase," engineers are working to fix the issue right now, and that missing messages will be restored as soon as possible. We'll soon see if this is a momentary setback... or a lengthy wakeup call.

More: Gmail accidentally resetting accounts, years of correspondence vanish into the cloud? (update) -- Engadget

Ohhhhhhh....... I connect all of mine using POP3 and save it to a local PST, so I guess I will be OK.

I might start downloading my messages (even though it would be a lot). I can't imagine this happening to me. I've been using Gmail since it debuted.

Like the article points out, Google has backups and will restore the missing messages.

pparks1 said:

Like the article points out, Google has backups and will restore the missing messages.

Until an earthquake takes out the backups...LOL.

fseal said:

Yeah, so much for the cloud... :/

It's not all that bad. Considering that 99.71% of the customer base was unaffected. Reported uptime for gmail in 2010 was 99.984%

Most "average" consumers who store their email on their local computers don't take backups, and don't even know how to restore their email if they even had a backup. So, if they lose a hard drive or something, they may just be without that email forever. In this case, they may just have to go a day without their email and then it will automatically reappear when the restores are completed.

I went to a Google conference a couple of weeks ago and they provided a couple of interesting facts:
#1). Google is the 4th largest server manufacturer in the world. However, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd server manufacturers actually sell their servers
#2). They build out the equivalent infrastucture of sites like eBay every 2 week.

It didn't happen to me but... that gmail account I have isn't my main e-mail address so... It's ok if I lose my mails.

pparks1 said:

I went to a Google conference a couple of weeks ago and they provided a couple of interesting facts:
#1). Google is the 4th largest server manufacturer in the world. However, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd server manufacturers actually sell their servers
#2). They build out the equivalent infrastucture of sites like eBay every 2 week.

I don't doubt it. They store a lot of data for search. And considering each mail account has ~7GB allocated and growing.

I read the affected number of accounts is about 150,000.