Maybe Cool Kid Tape Festishists Are Onto Something

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:
THIS is the Evolution of Storage?
Could the Floppy Disk Be the Next Icon of Retro Cool?
Digital Photography In 1975: Kodak’s First Cassette-Based DigiCam

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.