Ma.gnolia had no backup

written by Javier on 21/02/2009

Oh my gosh… I just went through this at Datacenter Knowledge. It’s about Ma.gnolia.com, the social bookmarking service:

The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia reports that all of its user data was irretrievably lost in the Jan. 30 database crash that knocked the service offline. That means that users who were unable to recover their bookmarks through publicly available tools (including other social media sites and the Google cache) have lost all their data.

This makes me think about bad luck, I mean REAL bad luck. There is another paragraph that left me thinking:

It turns out that Ma.gnolia was pretty much a one-man operation, running on two Mac OS X servers and four Mac minis. A clear lesson for users is not to assume that online services have lots of staff, lots of servers and professional backups, and to keep your own copies of your data, especially on free services.

I think it’s great that such a small team and infrastructure could manage a service like Magnolia. What don’t get is the lack of backups. Any hosting service would give you that for just a few bucks a month. I hope everything is back to normal soon. They deserve it.

There are 2 comments to this article:

  1. 22/02/2009Zarate says:

    It turns out they did have backups. The problem is the DB was corrupted and thus the backups too. That proves that dumping the data to another disk is not enough, you have to be able to *restore* from that data.

    More info on /.:

    http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/20/1543208

    Still, I feel for the people and the guy and we all should learn from this disaster.

  2. 22/02/2009despuesdegoogle » Blog Archive » Más sobre el caso Magnolia says:

    [...] un tweet aseguraba hace unos días que Ma.gnolia corría sobre 4 Mac Minis, un dato puntualizado en The Cosmonaut: Magnolia era gestionado con dos servidores Mac OS X y cuatro Mac Minis. Cuando menos, un soporte [...]

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