Techcrunch is reporting that many Gmail users discovered that there Gmail mails and contacts were completlely deleted . The issue was detected in Google Group forum where a user posted that his whole Gmail mails , sent mails , contacts were completely wiped out .Several users responded by saying that they have also experianced the same thing .Many users pointed out that they were using FireFox 2.0 and there mails were open at the time when the deletion occured .One user told that he received the following message after deletion “This is not a mistake. All your emails and contacts have been deleted on purpose. This was a malicious attack and not an error. Have a nice day. =)” . The cause of the problem is not clear to anyone though it might have been because of a security bug in FireFox 2.0 which was corrected in 2.0.0.1 .

This was the response of Google .

Thank you all for reporting this issue. We apologize for the scare and
inconvenience that it’s causing. We’re actively investigating as we
speak, and we’ll follow up individually with users in this thread as we
get to the bottom of the problem.

We appreciate your patience and understanding.

The guys at TechCrunch also received the following message from Google .

Hi there TechCrunch folks,

We saw your post today about Gmail and wanted to let you know what was going on.

Regretfully, a small number of our users — around 60 — lost some or all of their email received prior to December 18th. Once we found out about this issue, we worked day and night to confirm that only a few accounts were affected and to do whatever we could to restore as much of the users’ accounts as we could. We’ve also reached out to the people who were affected to apologize and to work with them to restore the email from any personal backup they might have.

We know how important Gmail is to our users – we use it ourselves for our corporate email. We have extensive safeguards in place to protect email stored with Gmail and we are confident that this is a small and isolated incident.

Thanks,
Courtney

So now after this incident ..the need for backup arises …

via TechCrunch