On February 17th, 2009 Mark Wubben wrote:
Chris Messina recently talked with Larry Halff of Ma.gnolia regarding their recent data loss and the story of Ma.gnolia itself:
Larry (@lhalff) and I have been recording a podcast for the past year called Citizen Garden that covers various topics related to the web, technology, and social networking.
Well, given Ma.gnolia’s recent catastrophe, we decided that episode 11 would dedicated to exactly what went down and why, and what lessons Larry has learned that others should heed in order to avoid facing a similar crisis.
I think the basic take-away is that, four years ago, when Larry started Ma.gnolia, your IT options were pretty much to use commodity shared hosting or to do it yourself. If you used Ruby on Rails — in which Ma.gnolia is written — your options were even more limited. And so Larry chose to do it himself.
Check it out: What really happened at Ma.gnolia and lessons learned | FactoryCity.
Henriette wrote about the data loss earlier.
[magnolia, ma.gnolia]
[38 comments]
Since friday the 30. of January the place where I have choosen to store all my bookmarks has been down. According to their Twitter account, ma.gnolia.com had severe failure. Which was okay for a day or two, but by now Im kinda wondering if I will ever see what I think is about 3 years of bookmarks again. Im pretty pissed about that to say the least. I have even wondered to myself "why oh why I have ever putted my bookmarks on the internet" - and "why oh why I didn't stay on del.icio.us".
Ma.gnolia had a lot of charm for me, and where a really interesting tool to use for open knowledge sharing within a company.
I am using my bookmarks everyday for research and benchmarking and best casestudies. I don't know if I will be able to access my "knowledge bank of expertise goods" which used to be my magnolia account.
They lost it - or so it seems.
I trusted their service so much - and I also thought that they had really great backup of our data, but I guess not.
Now in my current mood of "pissed off ness" I am sure that they have brought miscredit to all of the internet - from my point of view because I don't believe I will be able to trust an online service again - not without having it all backed up at home.
If I face it, there's a lot of those bookmarks that are not that important (a lot of them are - but probably 70 % I could live without).
But I would never be able to use ma.gnolia again - also because of their way of communicating to their users - which has almost non-existent. The value in my bookmarks is extremely high. I wanted to know the day after the failure that I would probably not see my bookmarks again.
Bottomline is: I wont be able to trust the internet with my data without having most of it backup at home. I can't believe that they could loose my data. I don't think my trust in social network and services will ever be regained. At least not in services where I store data that is actually that valuable to my work and my daily life.
[magnolia, ma.gnolia.com, bookmarks, data, trust, security, communication, badwill]
[6 comments]