Does Google Drive, Dropbox, or other file storage services generally use Backups or do they rely solely on replication? How many copies do they replicate?
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I don't think anyone can honestly answer this question. Any DropBox or Google employees have most likely signed NDAs on their architecture. In any case, any sysadmin who doesn't have backups needs to seriously consider if they're cut out for a career in IT. – Craig Watson Aug 17 '14 at 10:35
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As a former Google employee I can confirm the existence of NDA's like Craig is hinting at.
For years I was working with tape backups, which were kept secret from the public. The existence of tape backups was only made public after the Gmail incident in February 2011.
I do not know if Google Drive is also being backed up to tape, but I would be surprised if that was not the case.
If you want to know more about how Google does backup copies, take a look on this talk by my former colleague Raymond.
If you want to know more about how Google does replication, there are published papers about the Google File System (GFS) and its successor Colossus.
kasperd
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