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Google is backing up itself now. Wait, what?

by Jay on March 11, 2010

: Image by cogdogblog via Flickr

Google is apparently offering cloud-based self-backups for its Google Apps customers, which almost sounds like an article from The Onion. (“Google announces plans to partner with Google for data security.”) Sam Diaz over at ZDNet’s Between the Lines summarizes Google’s self-backup thusly:

Google, in its continued quest to lure enterprise customers to switch to the cloud-based Google Apps suite, is upping its offering with a free feature called synchronous replication.

In its simplest form, it’s the process of backing up data within Apps to multiple data centers so that, if there’s a disruption, the amount of data lost or the amount of time without access to the data is minimized.

Basically, if you’re a paying Google Apps customer, for whom Google already promises 99.9% uptime in your service level agreement, you can opt for synchronous replication, wherein Google will backup data your data in its cloud servers to its other cloud servers.

More specifically, while your Google Apps data is never relegated to a single drive or single server, it may be (Google won’t commit on this point, but it’s a probable implication) relegated to a single data center. Thus, a serious natural disaster could see your Google Apps data locked out or lost. Synchronous replication means that your Apps data is always in two physical data centers, so it would require two serious simultaneous infrastructure failures before you could lose access to your Apps.

I applaud the effort to remove data centers as a single point of failure in Google’s data security scheme. My only question is why isn’t this already standard for all Google user data?

The subtext of the synchronous replication announcement is the admission that even though Google has over 35 data centers worldwide — and the ability to deploy them anywhere in data center shipping containers — a failure at any one of these locations could wipe out all your data. I’m glad that paying Google Apps users — who likely have the most mission-critical data at stake — get synchronous replication for free, but what about the rest of us schmoes with years of messages and documents to lose if an earthquake flattens a single Mountain View server farm?

Hope you’ve got a backup plan.