Ma.gnolia Suffers Major Data Loss, Site Taken Offline

[DaBees-Knees]

http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/magnolia-suffer.html

There was a meltdown at bookmark sharing website Ma.gnolia Friday morning. The service lost both its primary store of user data, as well as its backup. The site has been taken offline while the team tries to reconstruct its databases, though some users may never see their stored bookmarks again. The failure appears to be catastrophic. The company can't say to what extent it will be able to restore any of its users' data. It also says the data failure was so extensive, repairing the loss will take "days, not hours." In light of today's outage, many are questioning the reliability of web apps and web-based storage in general. Twitter in particular is full of users venting their suspicions. "Cloud computing becomes fog when it goes down," says Todd Spragins in a Twitter post. Ma.gnolia posted a short note on its website shortly after 9 a.m. Pacific time, saying it was down temporarily due to a database failure. Later Friday morning, company founder Larry Halff issued an apology on the homepage along with the following note: Ma.gnolia experienced every web service's worst nightmare: data corruption and loss. For Ma.gnolia, this means that the service is offline and members' bookmarks are unavailable, both through the website itself and the API. As I evaluate recovery options, I can't provide a certain timeline or prognosis as to to when or to what degree Ma.gnolia or your bookmarks will return; only that this process will take days, not hours.

Indications of the problems to come with cloudware?

[White Stripes]

[sarcasm] theres this stuff called 'tape' .... usually mylar strips with this magnetic coating thats looks like... and... well.. pretty much is 'rust' (iron or chrome oxide)... these very long strips come in cartriges and can hold -massive- amounts of data.... recovering data from one of these devices is a bit slow but it tends to be intact when recovered.... and being removable 'head crash' isnt a problem... and hardware failure means a drive replacement... not data loss... [/sarcasm]


ok... a little clarity here.... tapes usually hold around 400gb compared to blurays 50 and dvds 8... i dunno why ppl rely on non-removable (non removable as in the drive mechanics and data are stuck together... so hot swap harddrives dont count...) media... ....hell even a huge stack of CDRs would have saved this day had someone taken the time to make the 'stack' in the first place...