Image via CrunchBase

Today, the bookmarking service Ma.gnolia announced that they have lost all the data due to data corruption. They may not even be able to recover the data completely, thereby, depriving users of the bookmarks they saved on their service.

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.

This started a panic reaction among the users and a simple twitter search yielded all sorts of reactions including the one below

This is a very valid concern and the outage in Magnolia only reaffirms the suspicions users have against SaaS. Even though such concerns are valid, it shouldn’t deter us from taking advantage of the features offered by SaaS. We don’t stop flying in airplanes even though we have seen many accidents (and terrorist attacks) including the recent one where a US Airways plane landed on Hudson river due to bird attack. We don’t stop saving our data on hard disks in spite of many people losing all their data stored in them. If I take this rhetoric further, I could even point out that we don’t stop living even though we know for sure that we will die one day. Smart people never succumb to such fears about the dangers in our daily life. Rather, they understand the risks involved and take steps to minimize the risks.

In fact, at Cloud Avenue, we understand the dangers associated with putting the data on the clouds and we take it upon ourselves to highlight it in our posts and offer suggestions to minimize it. If you look at one of my early posts in this blog, titled Questions To Ask Before Trusting a Cloud Vendor, I have highlighted the possibility of Magnolia like scenario and talked about asking the SaaS vendor about their backup plans in advance.

How many copies of customer's data do the vendors keep and are they stored in geographically separated regions?

In another post of mine, What is your cloud strategy, I talked about redundancy and the need for a good backup strategy. In fact, I can talk about how I backup my bookmarks. I use Diigo for my bookmarking purposes. I have setup Diigo to post the bookmarks automatically to my Delicious account. From my Delicious account, I stream my bookmarks to my friendfeed. So if Diigo goes down, I can head over to delicious and check out my bookmarks. In the unlikely scenario of both Diigo and Delicious going down at the same time, I can head over to friendfeed and use a greasemonkey script to access my bookmarks easily. In this era of Cloud based services, a backup strategy should be part of your gene.

The data corruption at Magnolia also calls into question the issue of standards. It is time for SaaS vendors to get together and evolve a good set of standards for backing up their clients’ data. This should serve as a wakeup call to all vendors to set up a fool proof backup strategy. As I said earlier, it is also important to have an industry standard on vendor backups. Thatz the only way we can get users to trust SaaS and other Cloud based services.

Also, check out Zoli’s post on this topic and the post by Wired.