Bookmarks
I was a user of ma.gnolia. In February, ma.gnolia lost all user data irrecoverably. This meant for me that all my online bookmarks — pointers to interesting sites and articles that I wanted to remember — were gone. Luckily, I could recover most of my boomarks from my blog archives and the Google cache. However, that has taken quite some time. During that time, no Links posts were possible. Now I am back to normal (and back to using delicious) and Links posts should resume as before.
This was quite a lesson for me. Little did I know that ma.gnolia was run by just one guy off a couple of Mac Mini servers in some basement. He didn’t even keep a backup. These days, when more and more services move into “the cloud”, we must be careful who to trust with our data. On the one hand, they must keep our data secure and not give it away to others. On the other hand, they must also ensure some sort of adequate backup. And if the services you use don’t provide a secure and stable backup, then you have to do it yourself.
Lesson learned.
