Gmail Bug A Good Lesson In Preparedness

Expect the unexpected... even if you are Google. Sometimes as software developers, regardless of how much you've done to mitigate risk, code goes out the door that has unexpected results. 

Over the weekend Google's Gmail team "...released a storage software update that introduced the unexpected bug, which caused 0.02% of Gmail users to temporarily lose access to their email." The trouble is that even with all of the redundancy built into their data centers, the bug deleted all online copies of the affected users data, which meant that the team was forced to restore from backup tapes. This is a time consuming process, especially when dealing with 0.02% of mail held by Gmail.

While those of us who have had to deal with these hair pulling ordeals can understand and sympathize with the development team, most users will not. Rest assured that the backup and recovery strategy has accomplished what it was intended to do. If anything, this is a valuable lesson in backing up data. What's your strategy? If your laptop took a tumble would you be able to recover?  

Disk Drive Data Recovered From Columbia Disaster

A Minnesota data recovery company, Kroll Ontrack, has been able to recover 95% of the data recorded on a disk drive that fell from the sky when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003. The drive's metal and plastic elements where scorched and the seal on the side that keeps dirt and dust out had melted. The company was fortunate that the drive was not full and the spinning metal platters that store the data were not warped. It turns out that because the computer housing the disk was running DOS and not a more modern operating system, the data was not scattered across the platters but rather bunched together and while they where not entirely intact most of the data was recoverable. The disk contained information from a scientific experiment, much of which had already been sent back to earth when the disaster took place, but the recovery of the missing data has enabled researchers to publish their findings. Amazing! CNN has the story here.