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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."
lesson #2, trust no-one with your data
lesson #3 disaster recovery capability only exists after it's been tested
lesson #4 backups are useless unless you can prove you can recover from them
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
"Gee, Bob, we have the proof that this thing works. Why don't we sell it already?"
"Well, Bill, nobody wants to buy it and grandfather in all the whining freeloaders and their data."
"It's too bad we can't just drop all the data and start fresh."
"Well, why not, Bill? All we have to do is say it's been lost and can't be recovered. We can tell the buyer what's actually happening so they don't think we're total IT rejects who couldn't figure out a data retention policy."
"That's why I like working with you, Bob. You always have a way around the problem."
Have fun with it. The names have been changed (one changed anyway and one added), well, because it probably has nothing to do with reality. It sure is fun to ponder, though.
I love it when people say things like this. It shows me that they've never actually had to set up an enterprise backup strategy. I'm certainly not defending the Ma.gnolia guys, but I also can't stand it when people are on a shakier soapbox than they realize.
I'm sorry, but when you are used to the whiz-bang-pretty of Web2.0, the state of enterprise-level backups is horrifically archaic and dismal. And, btw, given the size of today's hard drives and databases, for pretty much all intents and purposes "Enterprise" == "More than one computer with more than just a few files on a drive".
Compare and contrast: a 1 TB hard drive will run you roughly $100. Do you know how much it then costs to backup that TB?
LTO-4 tapes, 800GB each, $50-$150 each tape plus roughly $2500 for the drive. Figure 2 tapes/day * 10 days backups = 20 tapes * $100 = $2000 in tapes alone. Congrats, that 1 TB just cost you $4500 in enterprise backups ... not to mention the time involved each day in doing a backup. You might save yourself some time and money by doing incrementals ... but then you have to balance that risk with complexity of backups and difficulty in restores.
NAS is trickier. The cheap NAS solutions, sub $1000 such as Buffalo and LaCie, aren't going to get you much more than a TB or two. And at that point, are you really any better off than the RAID solution? Maybe, maybe not. As you start to scale into IBM or Dell solutions, you are almost immediately beyond a $2500 price point before you even get to hard drives. Oh, and don't forget the cost of a gigabit switch so that it doesn't take you days to do a single backup.
iSCSI? Seriously? Not an option for SOHO businesses.
Then there's backup software to contend with. It's not just as simple as "go buy a copy of BackupExec" -- there's different licensing for databases, and network backups, and whatever arcane rules they want today. I'm a PC guy so I can't talk much about Enterprise-level Mac backup solutions, but I can without a doubt say that Time Machine is not one of them.
It's even more dismal when it comes to Open Source solutions. Have you ever actually tried to setup Bacula? It may be the 600lb gorilla of OS backup solutions, but it's still a royal pain. And to the "just set up a cron job for rsync" guys, c'mon, really? Good luck with that.
So, please, let's dispense with the thought that backups are easy. Backups really suck. Hard. That's why so many people want to think of RAID as a backup solution -- because the step from one hard drive to two or three is easy, but the next step is much farther away than you think.
Are any of the free BSDs or Linux variants certified Unixes?
(Honest question, I don't know.)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Apple is 1% hardware and 99% Marketing. Not too much they do can't be done on a Dell or HP. They just make it appear to do it better/slicker/faster, that's all.
I'd peg it at 10% hardware, if not more. The internal hardware layout of Apple's desktop towers borders on beautiful. Beats Dell and HP hands down.
And, while its hardware failures tend to be more spectacular, I've generally found Apple hardware to be more reliable than any of the Wintel vendors. (...speaking as someone who has been supporting computers since before MS-DOS or the Mac...)
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