A while ago I wrote how a beta service I’d tried suddenly died. This week the geek-niche social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia reported a loss of all its data. Users came to know about the existence of a certain Larry who, it turned out, had been running Ma.gnolia all along. Larry came in to say sorry, but there was no backup. He is doing what he can to recuperate data – but it sounds as if the future of Ma.gnolia is now in doubt. On the Ma.gnolia site, he is even suggesting that customers open an account at a competing service, diigo.
Fortunately, since I was using Flock browser to upload bookmarks to Ma.gnolia, these are all stored offline too. I uploaded these to my old account at veteran social bookmarking site del.icio.us. Just in case any were missing, I also uploaded all those that had been captured by friendfeed, too. The lesson to be learned from all this is that if one is storing data online, to be careful to store it in more than one place.