Bookmarking Service Ma.gnolia Suffers Massive Outage, Data Lost
Matt Cox points out that Ma.gnolia, a bookmarking service, may have lost all the data (bookmarks) curated by its customers. The situation seems pretty dire.
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To be fair, what they’re saying seems to imply that they’ll restore from backups, so will lose some data but not all. (If they really lost all their data then there would be no point in executing a recovery plan.)
Unless the backups themselves are corrupted or are otherwise non-functional, in which case that’s it. But they haven’t said this yet.
I’m pretty bummed about this. I have thousands of links in ma.gnolia.
It’s times like this when I have to sit back and confirm all my web data backups, including MySQL databases. Ugh.
Hope they weren’t relying on RAID alone.
A professional entity in this day and age that’s handling customer data that doesn’t have a =reliable= backup is not professional.
They cant even get the dates right. It’s Friday the 30th.
Oooh, thanks for the link back to my blog, Mr. Malik. :)
Shit happens. The measure of an organization is not merely taken by the ways in which they fail, but more importantly in how they respond to it.
If they’re prepared and up to the task, they’ll be back online in a couple hours with minimal loss.
I have a lot more confidence in a service (like Github) which openly says they back things up to Amazon S3, because then I know as a failsafe there is something external and 100% reliable that can save you when the worst case scenario happens.
A shining example of why good ops and security folks are worth their weight in gold. Do NOT trust your hosting company to do your backups.
-Erica
… now they add a “no beverages in the datacenter” rule to their policies
All’s not lost if you’ve been sharing your bookmarks… :)
http://moot.mooh.org/archives/2009/01/recovering-magnolia-bookmarks.html