Slashdot Mirror
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."
Crashing Macs? That's unpossible!
Facebook was recently brought down when their hamster keeled over and ceased powering their Amiga.
Bored at work? Play Game!
This bad news is delicious food for Stallman's argument against "cloud" services.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
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.
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?
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
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
Good backup strategies are critical to any operation, regardless of platform. I've seen similar things happen with MSSQL server databases as well as Oracle running on the most powerful Sun box you can get (circa 2001).
One database backup strategy I've seen used rather successfully is doing a straight SQL dump every night and then copying the sql file over to somewhere else; even if the database became hopelessly corrupted there's still a way to re-import everything.
Of course, this is in *addition* to mirroring, tape backups, etc.
discussed the crash and the lessons to be learned
Lessons such as "Regularly monitor and maintain backups like and business should?"
Like frickin' having a backup? Isn't that one of the first things you ever learn if your business relies on computers + userdata?
ACK
You shouldn't use shiny plastic ornaments for serious business.
It's food for any argument against any web service that doesn't publish it's reliability information or publicize the data for what types of mechanisms it has in place in case of disasters like a corrupt database, fried motherboard, or busted hard drive.
There's a design methodology that's used by NASA for manned missions: Any individual component should be able to fail without compromising the mission. Of course, in the last few decades we've seen 2 out of 5 Shuttles go ka-boom! so obviously this NASA guideline isn't enough and it's *REALLY* hard to prevent failure when a perfect storm of multiple systems experience failure at the same time.
So if anything, I'd say this is an argument that supports robust, reliable, fault-tolerant design rather than just kludging a half dozen systems together and calling it a "web service".
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
My Mac servers run snapshots to external drives every hour. When something goes badly, it's back up in a few minutes. Not sure why that wouldn't have been done here.
I mean, just because a few medium-profile sites running on Macs have experienced a failure causing data loss doesn't make them unique. Every OS and every type of hardware will, at some point, experience a failure. It's the PEOPLE that make the failure a problem, and it sure looks like this tard was a problem.
Who the hell doesn't back up their data? Seriously? This is "Slashdot worthy" because some hapless Mac user lost their data. BOO FUCKING FAIL. Move on.
"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.
Rather than watch the video or download the 23MB MP3, you can read the full transcript here:
http://ratafia.info/post/78915439/transcript-and-commentary-for-whither-magnolia
I can read much faster than I can listen.
All right, let me get this straight: First you people bitch and moan when Facebook says they'll save user data forever. NOW you people bitch and moan when this site loses user data forever! You're never happy, are you?!?
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
Since the file system and database were corrupted, it wouldn't matter if it was hardware RAID or software RAID. That's not the problem at all, the problem is there was no archival backup, and their only backup was a file sync... that replicated the database errors on the backup.
To backup a database, you dump it in a serialized form, or maintain a serialized form of the data in parallel with the database.
And the users got what they paid for.
Simple as that.
The flip side is that this guy's service will probably be the MOST reliable going forward.
Of course he should have had reliable backups; now he is the poster child for backups. Remember, nobody pays you for backups, only for restores.
Ouch... Isn't part of a backup strategy to sometimes attempt a recovery from a backup, on a test system?
You have a 5 digit UID and you are just realizing this now?!?
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
Mac OS X Server runs a host of services, particularly for managing Mac OS X clients, that you won't find on any other OS, so there are reasons to get a Xserve in particular; web serving just is not one of them.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
obviously this NASA guideline isn't enough and it's *REALLY* hard to prevent failure when a perfect storm of multiple systems experience failure at the same time.
Neither the Challenger nor the Columbia represented simultaneous multiple failures. They *did* represent cascade failures that should have been planned for, but weren't.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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...)
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts