Reset Gmail accounts to be restored completely

Gmail users that have finally managed to enter their accounts only to find them devoid of any content can take a collective relieved breath as Google says that things we’ll be back to normal for all affected users very soon.

As news of the accidental resetting of a huge number of Gmail accounts echoed through the Internet yesterday, the question on everybody’s mind was “Will Google be able to restore all the lost data?”

As it turns out, the bug that triggered the event managed to affect many copies of the data in multiple data centers but, luckily for the users, the information has also been backed up on tapes which have not been affected since they are offline.

“But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it’s taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds,” explains Google, and blames the bug on a storage software update that was being deployed at the time.