Last week, Google’s services faced a brief, unprecedented outage. An outage lasting between one and five minutes only, but one that reportedly caused Internet traffic to drop by 40% and, possibly cause the company to lose about $500,000 in revenue.
That’s the scale at which Google operates!
From a technology point of view, considering the complexity, service levels and scale of their operations, their recovery time was commendable. No two ways about it.
However, if the outage had lasted longer and if you as a Gmail user had needed to find some old email or attachment, or refer to a past chat conversation, you would be so out of luck.
Unless, of course, you happen to use GmailVault 
In which case you’d have lightning fast, offline access to all your email, attachments and chats.
Prevention is better than cure. Back up your email.
