Ma.gnolia User Data Is Gone For Good

miller60 writes "The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia reports that all its user data was irretrievably lost in the Jan. 30 database crash that knocked the service offline. Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff recently discussed the crash and the lessons to be learned from Ma.gnolia's experience. A lesson for users: don't assume online services have lots of staff and servers, and always keep backup copies of your data. Ma.gnolia was a one-man operation running on two Mac OS X servers and four Mac minis."

Comments

Needless loss

[hattig]

Argh, why not just add a backup or replication database on one of the spare Mac Minis?

That way you would have needed a complete server farm disaster to mess things up irretrievably.

Re:Needless loss

[eln]

A simple periodic dump to an external hard drive would have at least been something. I know that small-time operations shouldn't be expected to have robust backup schemes, but if your primary purpose is to store other people's data, the FIRST thing on your mind should be how to back it up. Once you lose someone's data, they'll never use anything you put out again, and they'll tell all their friends not to either.

Re:Needless loss

[Ephemeriis]

Argh, why not just add a backup or replication database on one of the spare Mac Minis?

That way you would have needed a complete server farm disaster to mess things up irretrievably.

Replication gives you redundancy, much like RAID does. It lets you survive a hardware failure or two. It is not a backup. If the building burns down, or a tree falls on your server room, or lightning fries everything you are still screwed.

What they needed was a backup. A tape, or removable HDD, or a flash drive, or a CD, or something that can be taken out of the building on a regular basis. Once a day, once a week, once a month... Whatever.

Then, no matter what happens to your live hardware, you've got a backup you can restore from. Buy some new hardware, throw your backup at it, done!

Re:Needless loss

[Blakey Rat]

If you read the transcript, that's what they were doing, a simple firewire DB dump.

The problem is that they never tested the backups, and they didn't keep versioned backups. So they'd been backing-up the corrupted database for awhile before the site finally crashed for good. When it crashed, they only had the corrupted database backup. Additionally, the DB server was on RAID but of course the corrupted DB would just get saved to both HDs, so that's no good in a situation like this.

Basically, when the site crashed, he had three copies (2 RAID, 1 backup) of the data: all corrupt. The guy wasn't totally retarded when it came to backups, just 80% retarded.

Who the hell is Ma.gnolia

[Jailbrekr]

And how can they be slashdot worthy when they are a social networking site with ONLY a half a terabyte of data? In short, who cares?

Re:Food for Stallman

[ZeroPly]

Stallman's argument is more that cloud services are almost always non-open. He does not have a per se objection to cloud services - and if you were to reveal all your source code and protocols, I doubt it would be objectionable to him.

Of course it's impossible to free cloud services in the sense of modification and distribution, but if the source is open you have the chance to make your own.

Re:Mac reliability

[beelsebob]

Yes, because they don't come with apache and php pre-installed, only a ticky box away from running.

Seriously, do people still not realise that OS X is just UNIX with a pretty UI?