Gmail accidentally resetting accounts, years of correspondence vanish

[Kari]

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

 

[Golden]

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

 

[Win7User512]

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.

 

[pparks1]

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

 

[Win7User512]

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

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

 

[fseal]

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

 

[pparks1]

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.

 

[Lebon14]

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.

 

[Win7User512]

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.

 

[GEWB]

MY OPINION ONLY -

Got stung by Hotmail years ago then got BURNED by the Google BUZZ fiasco last year.

The "cloud" is not where I'm going to trust any of my data...lest it gets vaporized or leaked to the world + dog.

Regards,
GEWB

 

[unifex]

I use gmail as my main email account, however, I do download my messages to my home PC on a daily basis. This way all my messages are safe from any "cloudness". Moreover, the Google idea of never deleting messages is totally lost on me - I don't understand why would I need to keep messages that are clearly not needed anymore. So, I actually do delete lots of messages not only on my home PC, but also on gmail itself.

 

[Win7User512]

This way all my messages are safe from any "cloudmess".

Fixed.

 

[seekermeister]

While I do keep my emails locally, I'm still glad to find that it appears that my online Gmail account is intact. I really like the redundancy that it affords.

 

[Fayla]

No loss for me, as I deleted my old GMail address a couple of weeks ago (switched over to using my domain email+Hotmail.)

 

[Crispy]

.08% of Gmail users shut out of their accounts

Really nasty,
Many thousands of Gmail users are waking up today to find their accounts disabled, completely wiped clean of emails and in some cases their contacts are missing.
Although some users have reported their accounts fully restored many are left stranded. Google says its engineers are busy working on the problem and have already helped out many of the affected users of their popular email service.
Gmail engineer Mike CH has said the disabling of certain accounts is just a temporary maintenance measure:
Over night we temporarily disabled access to some Gmail accounts due to a service disruption. The disables are in place to stop the account from changing whilst we make the necessary repairs.
Access to your accounts will be restored shortly. Whilst an account is disabled:

• 
  [*]You will be unable to sign in to any Google service.
  [*]Mail sent to the account will bounce.
  [*]Hosted content you own like blogs, sites, shared items in Google Reader and so on will be unavailable.

The message you see on sign-in may refer to you to Google terms of service, but this is a generic and incorrect message. You have not violated the terms of service and we’ll restore your account access as soon as we can.
There is no update on the official Gmail blog, but you can get the latest info on the disruption from this web page.

Source: .08% of Gmail users shut out of their accounts


I know this I am in the 0.08% that account got disabled.

 

[kado897]

That's 3 days now. Fortunately not affected but so much for the cloud.

 

[roncerr]

Google: cloud dvorak

 

[pparks1]

That's 3 days now. Fortunately not affected but so much for the cloud.

Actually, it's not 3 days. Look at this page for status reports, Apps Status Dashboard

On 2/27/2011 at 3:09PM (my timezone), reports came in that something was wrong
By 2/27/2011 at 10:40PM, reports were coming back that some customers were fixed

So, within 7 hours the problem that had impacted 0.29% of the user base was cut back to 0.08%.

At approx 24 hours later, the problem was reduced to 0.02% of the userbase. This was 1:00pm on 2/28/2011

As of today, they are not reporting problems and the problem is fixed.


So, overall, I think the cloud worked just fine for most people. Had these people experienced problems with their ISP's or had their local computer crash, most might not have been fully recovered and back in business within 24 hours or within 72 hours.

The fact that all people are on a system that is constantly updated, running high end storage systems and all data "IS" backed up and secure (and proven since it was restored), speaks pretty well to the fact that Google "IS" doing a "GREAT" job with their cloud offering.

 

[Win7User512]

Google still uses tapes to backup the data:

Google goes to the tape to get lost emails back - Google 24/7 - Fortune Tech

Brilliant.

 

[kado897]

That's where I got the 3 days from. It is still showing disruption today. Perhaps I should have been more precise and said three days of reported disruption.