The Gmail issue from last week

There's been a lot of bits devoted to bashing Google about screwing up a small percentage (admittedly it was a bunch of people) of Gmail accounts.As an aside I use them to serve my email at vec.com and I've gotten nothing but exemplarily service thus far.I'm not going to necessarily defend them, but I want to make a point. Not only do they have the data replicated, but the reason it's taking longer than people are expecting in this age of instant is that they also have tape backup of the accounts.I've seen too many scenarios where there wither wasn't a backup, the supposed backup didn't work or the right data wasn't backed up.Everything built by man can break. Given enough time it will break. The trick is having a backup that works.The problem with cloud computing is that people assume that things will always work. Cloud computing is just plain computing where you don't know what machine your requests are going to. There is no magic to it. If you really want something, you should still be responsible for it.That being said, Google's getting a lot better uptime that I was ever able to get when I was running my own mail server!