On Thursday, December 16, 2010 08:12:34 am Arnold Krille did opine:
On Thursday 16 December 2010 01:13:24 Dan Kegel
wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 10:48 PM, gene heskett <gheskett(a)wdtv.com>
wrote:
Now, if we can just get a law that when I have ...
issued the delete
to the server, it truly was deleted
For what it's worth, Google's caution in promising deletion
is probably because it's not quite sure how to do that
quickly. Users would be Very Very Angry if a disk outage
or a fire in a datacenter resulted in the loss of their stored
email, so Google probably has some sort of offsite backup
arrangement, and that might complicate prompt deletion.
... yup,
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=7401
says
"residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up
to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our
backup systems."
So, if you were google, would you use tape backup? If so,
how would you do that permanent deletion thing? If not,
how would you make darn sure you didn't anger users by
losing messages during a disaster?
I don't think google uses magnet-tapes or similar for any backups except
the vital core data of its business. Given the number and size of their
data- centers around the world, they just sync the data to a different
part of the world an be done with it. Of course the deletion has to be
synced to all remote-copies and probably also forwarded to older
backups but once such a mechanism is implemented it should do the
actual delete within a day...
There are even universities that decided against a new tape-library and
in favor of a big stack of disks for long-term backup because these
where cheaper, similar reliable and much faster for restore. And they
don't need a special tape-library-managing app to access the data, a
file-browser or the command-line is enough...
Have fun,
Arnold
I run amanda here every night, but no tape, big disks instead. Much more
usable come recovery times.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
The real reason psychology is hard is that psychologists are trying to
do the impossible.