A massive server failure at Ma.gnolia on January 30 has resulted in almost all of the data, mainly bookmarks, at the social bookmarking site to be lost. Four days after the fact, Ma.Gnolia is still attempting to rebuild their servers and recreate the lost data, but a recent post on the Ma.gnolia site by its founder is prepping users for the worst.
So-called Web 2.0 websites like Ma.gnolia, Flickr or Del.icio.us have been leaders in the move to cloud computing: the storage of data on webservers, rather than hard drives. The obvious benefit of this is that users can take advantage of cheap storage and house massive amounts of data on these servers. Because the data is on webservers, there are two more advantages: the data can be accessed from any Internet-linked device, and it can be shared with, and in some cases added to, by others. In the case of a site like Ma.gnolia (which in full disclosure I used) users could bookmark and tag websites and even clips from websites, so that they could be easly found again. Users of the site could also search everyone else's bookmarks as well, so if I, for example, was looking for information on cloud computing, I could search my own bookmarks, and all other users' bookmarks as well. It's a tremendously helpful research tool as others have already done much of your legwork for you.
But the failure of Ma.gnolia highlights a prime drawback of cloud computing, the "all your eggs in one basket problem." Just like when your hard drive fails, the failure of webservers wipes out your data. An obvious problem, but one that has not been discussed widely, as many proponents of the cloud often posit the safety of data on the cloud as one of its advantages, due to backup servers and other redundancies.
The Ma.gnolia loss may be a rare event. The odds of a Web 2.0 site losing both its primary and backup servers were seen as quite low, hence the surprise in the user community. How the data were lost (and Ma.gnolia has not been forthcoming on details about this) might go a long way toward mollifying worried Web 2.0 users. One failure does not spell the end of cloud computing, despite the elimination of millions of bookmarks and manhours of work, and the severing of numerous social connections that existed only on the Ma.gnolia site. Ultimately this may be seen as a small setback in the migration to the information cloud, but I am sure that today that is small comfort to those who've seen years of work wiped out.
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