Oh Where, Oh Where Can My Bookmarks Be? Magnolia Suffers Huge Outage!

Every morning, when I boot up my computer and open a browser, I have 4 tabs open to the Matrix Group intranet, Twitter, Facebook and Magnolia. Magnolia is a popular social bookmarking site that I have come to rely on to store and organize my bookmarks.

Imagine my horror when I clicked on the Magnolia home page this morning and found this message:

Dear Ma.gnolia Community Members or Visitor,

Early on the West-coast morning of Friday, January 30th, 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.

Magnolia has been down for most of the day and I’m devastated.  It’s not unusual for me to add one or more bookmarks each day to my Magnolia account.  And I refer to my bookmarks constantly.  For example, while preparing for my presentation on tech trends and their impact on small associations, I scoured my bookmarks under the tags of statistics and tech trends.

My husband says I should have used Delicious all along, but really, this outage could have happened to any of the free, hosted sites.

Matrix Group offers a hosted membership database solution for associations (MatrixMaxx) and we work very hard to and spend good money to make sure we have good, reliable and redundant back-ups.  Our clients expect nothing less from us because their applications and data are mission-critical.

But what kind of expectations can I have/should I have re: back-up from a free, hosted service like Magnolia? Can I really be pissed off that my bookmarks are gone when I haven’t paid Magnolia a dime?  And if Magnolia does recover, will I trust them with my bookmarks again?  Ugh.