Early this morning Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking service in the ranks of Delicious and Diigo, was down for maintenance due to a catastrophic failure in their systems. If any users were to head to the website, they would’ve received the following message:
        

A Reality Check About Cloud Services

Shortly after seeing the above status message and before writing this post the message became the following:
   

Dear Ma.gnolia Community Members or Visitor,

Early on the West-coast morning of Friday, January 31st, 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.

I will of course keep you appraised here and in our Twitter account.

Most importantly, I apologize to all of you who have made Ma.gnolia a home for your bookmarks and community. I know that many of you rely on Ma.gnolia in your day to day work and play flow to safely host you bookmarks, keeping them available around the clock, and that this is a difficult disruption.

Sincerely,
Larry

I have a few bookmarks available on the service from years ago when I first signed-up. However, if they lose my bookmarks, I won’t be worried. Most of them were irrelevant by now anyway.

However, for hardcore users of not only Ma.gnolia, but cloud services in general, this is a cold harsh reality check of the dangers faced when trusting internet services to store your data. There’s little that Ma.gnolia can do in terms of support, except hope for the best. However, if any of all of their user’s bookmarks are lost, there will be numerous complaints rolling in left and right. Don’t expect too much sympathy though. We’re quite sure that Ma.gnolia as a company is doing its best to ensure that everything is restored properly, but nothing will make-up for lost bookmarks, especially if they were important. The service doesn’t provide premium offerings so extending that type of service is out of the question for anyone that loses a little faith in Ma.gnolia after this situation is resolved.
    

Staying Loyal To Services That Have Stayed Loyal To You

Consumers are fickle. Even more fickle are social media users because we have so many options and alternatives to explore. However, to the users of Ma.gnolia’s services, if the service is restored and everything is back up and running in a few days, I’d advise you to stick with Ma.gnolia unless the company tells you otherwise. Why? Because this is the risk you run with any cloud service. You knew that when you signed up; you just hoped it wouldn’t happen. If you didn’t have a reason to switch from Ma.gnolia before now, don’t let this situation be the reason to change your mind unless Ma.gnolia has completely screwed-up (dubious imho).

Just remember to save a backup of your bookmarks somewhere on your hard drive next time.