There's still not a way to recover from user errors like accidental deletion, which is a much more regular recovery activity where I work. And I don't know what he's talking about with "everything after that point is lost" -- if our mail stores went kaput, we'd still be able to queue mail for delivery when the stores come back online.
My grandma deleted all of the emails from her gmail account because she thought that they were kept on the hard drive and she was getting a new computer. :(
> To backup 25GB of data with synchronous replication a business may easily pay from $150 to $500+ in storage and maintenance costs- and that's per employee.
Per year? Per month? Dollar numbers for maintenance, without a time period, have no meaning.
Um. No, that's likely per month. I work for an online backup provider; the industry price is up to about $5 per gigabyte month. I don't know our price list, but I'm also comfortable saying that rate based on looking for an online backup provider myself.
I think Google meant per year here because Google apps product pricing is $50 per user per year which gives 25GB of space per user.