Google apologized to Gmail users who lost email to a recent buggy software update and promised they will have their missing email restored shortly. But the retrieval is taking longer than usual because Google is relying on old-fashioned tape to find the missing email.

Google explained in a blog post that while the company maintains several electronic copies of every email sent through its system, this particular glitch destroyed every electronic copy of the affected email. Indeed, the reason the email can be retrieved at all...