When we say that a system is “reliable”, we do not mean that it is impossible for that system to fail. No such system ever has been built, and none probably ever will be built. What we mean is that failure is a very, very improbable event.

But just like with the lottery, the occurence of one highly improbable event does not render the occurence of the next highly improbable event impossible, or even more improbable. So has it occured to people that maybe Ma.gnolia just got really, really unlucky and had their backup system fail just as it was needed?

Is it a good idea to dismiss a service just because the dice rolled in a bad way? Especially when it is a service that has offered a level of functionality not matched by most of its competitors, and an administration that, as far as this relatively new user can tell, seems to be friendly and genuinely concerned with its user base? Anybody who has been on the Internet for a while knows that last part is far from being a given when one does business with a new service; if anything, a combination of screaming, borderline psychotic arrogance and mindboggling idiocy seems to be more the norm in the industry. Things could be be worse, and have been at companies that are still with us, so why not give these guys a break?

As for lost data, while I do sympathise with those who might have lost large amounts of work, and hope that they haven’t, I would remind them that if there were any foulups, they weren’t Ma.gnolia’s alone. Aren’t we all aware of the need to keep backups of our work on our own hard drives? Granted, that isn’t always feasible with all services (e-mail services come to mind), but what would keep a user of Ma.gnolia or some other bookmarking service from keeping a copy of his bookmarks on his own computer? Or from downloading copies of pages on the site into a subdirectory on his own computer, so that he could cut and paste copies of his own commentary back onto the site, should the worst happen at their end?

These are all things that even the newest of users know that they should be doing. If some of those who are maybe out in the cold right now didn’t do so, whose fault is that?

Magnolis, use your PR people to help you with lucid thinking!

http://moot.mooh.org/archives/2009/01/recovering-magnolia-bookmarks.html

-Erica

If they’re prepared and up to the task, they’ll be back online in a couple hours with minimal loss.

Hope they weren’t relying on RAID alone.

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.