Ma.gnolia User Data Is Gone For Good

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Ma.gnolia User Data Is Gone For Good

Posted by kdawson on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:48AM from the lost-in-the-clouds dept.

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."

35 of 450 comments (clear)

Mac reliability by Anonymous Coward · 2009-02-20 04:50 · Score: 5, Funny

Crashing Macs? That's unpossible!
1. Re:Mac reliability by jetsci · 2009-02-20 04:58 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  So umm...I have a confession...
  
  I had no idea anyone actually used Mac's as servers. Sure, I bet you can get apache running or something but I didn't realize anyone had. Therefore, this is my first bit of exposure to this idea of Macs as servers and its all negative!
  
  Woe is me.
  
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2. Re:Mac reliability by BJZQ8 · 2009-02-20 05:04 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  http://www.apple.com/xserve/
3. Re:Mac reliability by beelsebob · 2009-02-20 05:19 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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?
4. Re:Mac reliability by Idiomatick · 2009-02-20 05:26 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  In the same sense that horses and monkeys are JUST mammals. Doesn't mean that they share THAT much in common...
5. Re:Mac reliability by neokushan · 2009-02-20 05:35 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  I want to say something here, but I get the feeling that no matter what I say, I just wont be herd.
  
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6. Re:Mac reliability by SatanicPuppy · 2009-02-20 05:42 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Mac servers are pretty. They do okay, they have nice swanky data enclosures, and the form factor is roughly the same as anyone elses.
  It's just whether or not you want to use OS X. I disagree that OS X is "just unix," however. It's not even "just linux" or "just bsd". OS X has it's own warts, and while it may be stable and friendly, I'd rather have a real *nix running on less pretty hardware.
  The best use I've ever had for the big Mac servers is running as a file server in a windows/mac environment. If you still have any pre-OS X machines around, that's about the only way to get them all on the same machine (If you say windows mac volume, I'm mailing a dead fish to your house).
  Otherwise, you know, you can install apache, whatever, but it's not any different from using a regular linux server in terms of increased functionality, and there are some significant OS update issues that can cause problems. Mac updates are of the all or nothing school, and they WILL break stuff, so you need to be careful.
  
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  ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
7. Re:Mac reliability by FishWithAHammer · 2009-02-20 05:49 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  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."
8. Re:Mac reliability by Blakey+Rat · 2009-02-20 06:05 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Yeah, but that's exactly the surprising part. Why would you pay Apple $3000 for a xserve running Apache and MySQL, with a crappy service contract (no next-day service, no on-site service-- I've looked into it), when you could buy an equivalent Dell server for $2100, running the exact same Apache and MySQL, and get a next-day and on-site service contract?
  Anyone who buys an xserve is an idiot.
  
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  Comment of the year
9. Re:Mac reliability by idontgno · 2009-02-20 06:16 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  That'd be gnus to me.
  
  --
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10. Re:Mac reliability by Blakey+Rat · 2009-02-20 06:33 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Fine; what company do you trust? HP? IBM? Replace "Dell" with them, and my example still applies. The fact is, *every* server vendor can do better than Apple. Even IBM does better, and they suck.
  Oh, and BTW, all servers will have hardware problems from time-to-time. When that happens with your Dell, HP, IBM server, the guy is there in his truck in 4 hours. When that happens to your Apple server, you're SOL.
  
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  Comment of the year
11. Re:Mac reliability by meadowsoft · 2009-02-20 07:02 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  I think you are missing the importance of a disaster recovery plan, with backups, for any mission critical hardware, regardless of vendor. Why didn't Mag have any sort of backup plan that was tested? Clustered hardware does not equal a backup plan - thanks for trying there.
  Was there in fact a schedule of backups of the operational system? This seems like a rubber band and duct tape operation to me.
12. Re:Mac reliability by DittoBox · 2009-02-20 07:03 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Except its the same hardware...well no, that's not true. You can get a Dell with actual hardware RAID when you're stuck with software RAID on an Xserve.
  Furthermore Dell also has a 4-hour onsite 24/7 support package if I'm not mistaken.
  I love my MacBook and the OS X desktop experience but you simply can't use an Xserve on business critical operations.
  
  --
  Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
13. Re:Mac reliability by SSCGWLB · 2009-02-20 07:55 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Wait, you mean apples makes all their own hardware? Really?
  No, they use CPUs from Intel, hard drives from WD/Seagate/Maxtor/whoever, graphics chips from nVidea/ATI, etc.
  So, no, you do NOT get what you pay for hardware wise. You are getting something identical or very similar to everybody else, from the same manufactures, you are just paying a little more.
14. Re:Mac reliability by period3 · 2009-02-20 08:50 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  and it comes with a free black turtleneck!
15. Re:Mac reliability by blhack · 2009-02-20 09:04 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Even IBM does better, and they suck.
  One morning I came in and was looking at the logs. SMART was reporting that one of the disks in one of the servers was going to go bad soon. Not 15 minutes after i even noticed this in the logs, an IBM tech was there with a fresh one ready to replace it.
  How? The server called home, told IBM about the error, and they disbatched a tech immediately.
  If that "sucks", your service must come with free hookers or something.
  
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16. Re:Mac reliability by ThrowAwaySociety · 2009-02-20 09:38 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  a crappy service contract (no next-day service, no on-site service-- I've looked into it)
  Not very hard, apparently.
  http://www.apple.com/server/support/
  
  You get 24/7 telephone and email support with 30-minute response. For hardware repairs, Apple-certified technicians provide onsite response within four hours during business hours and next-day onsite response when you contact Apple after business hours.
In other news by jetsci · 2009-02-20 04:50 · Score: 5, Funny

Facebook was recently brought down when their hamster keeled over and ceased powering their Amiga.

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1. Re:In other news by elrous0 · 2009-02-20 05:01 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  In that case, the death of Mr. Furry was a much greater loss than the data.
  
  --
  SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
2. Re:In other news by palegray.net · 2009-02-20 05:37 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  I think it's a tragedy that the first thing that came to mind reading your post involved a blood-spattered "furry" (as in a dude wearing some fluffy costume). The Internet has done terrible things to my mind.
  
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Needless loss by hattig · 2009-02-20 04:54 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
1. Re:Needless loss by qoncept · 2009-02-20 05:01 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Or back it up, like, once a day, or week, or ever, to a flash drive or something. That's a lesson that's already been learned, and it's common sense. I'm terrible about backing up my own data (anything I've lost and recovered is usually something that just happened to be on a remote web server somewhere, coincidentally, because it was always intended to be on the web). But all of my websites, with other users' data, are backed up. It doesn't take a very complex scheme or much thought. A cron job to dump your database and tar your web structure and then copy it to a different location.
  
  I definitely have my doubts that someone who could make this mistake is all that capable "lessons learned."
  
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  Whale
2. Re:Needless loss by eln · 2009-02-20 05:10 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
3. Re:Needless loss by Ephemeriis · 2009-02-20 05:17 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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!
  
  --
  "Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
4. Re:Needless loss by Blakey+Rat · 2009-02-20 05:57 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
  
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  Comment of the year
Who the hell is Ma.gnolia by Jailbrekr · 2009-02-20 04:56 · Score: 5, Insightful

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?

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Re:Food for Stallman by ZeroPly · 2009-02-20 04:57 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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lesson #1 by petes_PoV · 2009-02-20 04:57 · Score: 4, Interesting

on the 'net you can't tell the major corporation from the kid in a garage
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

--
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Lesson? by The+Moof · 2009-02-20 04:59 · Score: 4, Insightful

discussed the crash and the lessons to be learned

Lessons such as "Regularly monitor and maintain backups like and business should?"
1. Re:Lesson? by Knowbuddy · 2009-02-20 05:46 · Score: 5, Interesting
  Lessons such as "Regularly monitor and maintain backups like [any] business should?"
  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.
Lessons Learned?? by ACK!! · 2009-02-20 05:00 · Score: 4, Insightful

Like frickin' having a backup? Isn't that one of the first things you ever learn if your business relies on computers + userdata?

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ACK /ak/ interj. 2. [from the comic strip "Bloom County"] An exclamation of surprised disgust, esp. i
"Private relaunch?" by mr_mischief · 2009-02-20 05:16 · Score: 4, Interesting

"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.
Transcript of interview by Chalex · 2009-02-20 05:18 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
Finally! A privacy solution! by Captain+Spam · 2009-02-20 05:18 · Score: 5, Funny

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?!?

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Re:Finally! A privacy solution! by chaim79 · 2009-02-20 05:55 · Score: 4, Funny

You have a 5 digit UID and you are just realizing this now?!?

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