Ma.gnolia data is lost
At the beginning of the year, I wrote a post about the demise of JournalSpace. JournalSpace’s demise was caused because they lost all of the data on their database server and didn’t have an adequate backup. Well it has happened again to another Web 2.0 site: the social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia. While Ma.gnolia did have backups, they apparently were not keeping older copies of the backups. There was a data corruption issue on the server, and backing up bad data isn’t going to help when you have an issue. The person who ran Ma.gnolia, Larry Halff was interviewed by Citizen Garden and takes full responsibility and discusses what went wrong. It is a learning lesson for everyone in the Web 2.0 world.
While neither JournalSpace or Ma.gnolia were the biggest in their Web 2.0 niches, it is a big loss to users of these services. I am sure this will happen to other sites, so if you use these sites and you want to make sure you have perpetual access to your data,you need to make sure you have your one backups. Also, if you put one of these services up, make sure you have a proper backup strategy.