It is now day seven of Magnolia's outage, with no end in sight, and hope seems to be fading. Now, this isn't a national catastrophe or anything, but I had some really interesting bookmarks there and now I'm bummed that I may not get access to them again. I can't exactly stumble around the web looking for them all again, because I don't even remember what all was there.
I have been able to uncover a bunch of my bookmarks using the magic of Google cache, although I haven't started the process of transferring them to Delicious yet. So I'm happy about that. There are also a number of other recovery options being discussed on a thread that's been opened over at Get Satisfaction. I'm pissed at myself, though, for not being a little more forward thinking and having some sort of backup to my Magnolia stash. I never bothered setting up an RSS feed to dump into anything, and never once exported my bookmarks to a plain HTML file, because I'm lazy. I just figured, hey, it's an online resource, they've got to have their own backups if something goes wrong, right? Plus, at the end of the day it's only bookmarks. It's not like it's my bank account being compromised, and the content of those bookmarks is still floating around out there in the 'tubes.
I've learned my lesson, though: I pointed my Delicious RSS feed toward Google Reader, and I'll probably set up a reader on my own PC when I get home, to have a local backup. Kind of defeats the purpose of an online store of bookmarks, but I don't want to get burned again. I might check out other social bookmarking sites - Diigo was suggested by Magnolia founder Larry Halff, but it seems iffy to me. Lacks the simplicity I loved about Magnolia.
Anyway, the point of this post is to highlight a different posting, on the Get Satisfaction thread. Most of the conversation focuses on various methods of data retrieval, all from external sources like Google cache and FriendFeed, so people can get their bookmarks back. One guy, however, chose to go on a rant, quoting one of the first messages on the Magnolia homepage that discussed the severity of the outage. I'll just paste the whole thing here:
onionsformagnolia replied 9 hours ago
Larry, on your home page, you wrote:
"So far, my efforts to recover Ma.gnolia's data store have been unsuccessful. While I'm continuing to work at it, both from the data store..."
How is that possible? What is this "data store" you're talking about? Was there no back up?
"In this past year, many of us have seen much loss around us."
What does this have to do with the current problem, other than a lame attempt at deflection?
"While bookmarks seem small on the national or global scale, I know that many of you had built intellectual and social capital through the bookmarks, groups, and connections you made here."
A blinding flash of the obvious. So far, you've said many words without saying anything.
"Ma.gnolia was approaching the third anniversary of its public launch; for me, it was the project and people to which I'd devoted most of my time, energy, and love for nearly four years. It's still a little too soon to give word about the return of Ma.gnolia the service and the future of the M2 project, but I will keep this site and our Twitter account updated as those decisions are made."
You have nerve to even talk about the return of Magnolia and M2, whatever that is/was. Forget it. This "business", if it ever was viable, is now dead all but in name. I wouldn't entrust anything to you any more because of the way you've bungled this. You've been quite evasive in answering direct questions posed to you about what happened. If you owe at least one thing to Magnolia users, it's an honest explanation.
At the moment, it looks like I've lost thousands of bookmarks that I've added over the last couple of years and I did not have them anywhere else because I was foolish enough to assume that Magnolia was being run by competent people! To say that I'm pissed off is an understatement. The irony is that I had evaluated and rejected Delicious and SimpPy for reasons that I don't even recall any more. I've lost something of tremendous value and by the looks of it, I will not be able to recover anything since none of the "solutions" that you have posted so far work for me. I'm working on the assumption that any competent system administrator would have been able to get a server running by now and restored from a backup, even if *some* data was lost.
What happened? Your server got seized by creditors? You had a nervous breakdown? Ex-wife got the server? Your dog ate the server? Your server got abducted by aliens? You had a disk crash and hadn't done a back up since, well, ever?
It's hard to imagine how you could look any worse so I suggest you just come clean. If it's a matter of money, I'd contribute toward a solution but not without knowing the whole, unvarnished truth. So, how about it? Are you going to explain exactly what happened or are you going to continue your "keep 'em in the dark and feed them horse shit" communications strategy?
Harsh. I won't say this guy (girl?) doesn't make good points, because they are very good points. I had the same questions myself, once I realized that this wasn't a case of someone saying "this issue may take several days to correct" just to prepare people for the worst, only to have the site back up by noon the next day.
But let's have some perspective. You're talking about using a free online service (those who did pay for Magnolia's "premium" services will receive a refund, according to Larry) to keep track of information that you found useful on the Web. When you use something that's given away for free, your complaint leverage is greatly diminished. Especially when the tools were always available for you to backup your thousands of bookmarks.
I had a little over 300 bookmarks on Magnolia, well short of Mister Angry's thousands, and while I am miffed about potentially losing those, I'm more upset that I didn't give myself a fallback option. No contingency. My fault. If I had thousands of bookmarks, and if they were all that important to me, I would have made sure to have a backup. It would never occur to me to go on this kind of rant against a guy who's watching years of his hard work circle the drain and is already fully aware that the situation has upset a lot of people. I mean, I can get on a pretty hellacious rant, don't get me wrong, but over this?
Yet within hours this rant was upvoted as one of the "best points" on the discussion thread (albeit by a whopping 6 people as of this writing), above and beyond the actual constructive suggestions, and is featured at the top of the thread. It's a fine illustration of the testicular-inflation effect of the Internet.
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