On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 7:31 AM, Vick Khera <vi...@khera.org> wrote: > On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 9:15 AM, Bill Au <bill.w...@gmail.com> wrote: >> In theory there is a breaking point somewhere, right? > > I don't think google has hit it yet, so I'd have to say nobody has > reached "the breaking point" yet.... > > What do the big places do when people quit the service? Ie, if I > close my facebook or twitter, does all that data just continue to sit > there?
One typical solution would be to move data to offline (backup to tapes, back in the day). Take a snapshot of relevant data, add to cheaper storage, remove from primary storage. This is used for all kinds of things, cleaning up inactive accounts, rolling old logs, backups. So it does not always need to mean complete hard deletes, but maybe just moving to secondary storage, from which it has to be explicitly reinstated if need be. Most common I assume is just soft-deleting things tho; adding a flag indicating that the thing is not to be surfaced, even though it is still stored. This can of course be combined with vacuuming stale stuff to secondary storage. Would be nice to have system that does this. -+ Tatu +-
