Here’s a thing I didn’t know: Google backs up all of its information on offline tapes—like, actual magnetic tape. Your e-mails are apparently saved in a room somewhere on a cassette along with millions of others. Neat—that’s comforting.We learned this Monday in a Google blog post explaining why it was taking so long to resurrect the e-mail accounts of some 150,000 people that were lost Sunday due to a software bug (gone: inbox, outbox, folders, all your stuff). Google had to find the tape, get the information back online, process it, and get it back into your account.A post on Fortune magazine’s blog estimates that for that amount of users, it would’ve taken about 200,000 storage tapes, or enough to stack 4 km high. Baffling.Related:
Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.Image: straight old-school.
