Wilting Magnolia

Following on from the news at the start of this year that online bookmarking site Ma.gnolia has had to end its public service due to a data backup disaster, we’re going to explore for a moment data backups.

It appears that Ma.gnolia was built upon an architecturally flawed system despite making regular backups to a separate drive. The main database became corrupted and was dutifully copied to the backup drive. Thus the circle was complete and both the live data and the backup were both corrupt. Despite many days of expert data recovery only a fraction of the data was ever recovered and the Ma.gnolia service was finished.

Don’t get burned

So what are you / your ISP doing to ensure the safety of your data and what lessons can be learned from this horror story? There are some serious questions that you need to ask yourself:

• What systems do you have in place for disaster recovery?
• What would you do if your data was lost forever?
• How long could your business survive while your backup data was located and restored?
• Are your backups safe; or are they kept in the same location as your live data?
• Do you backup sensitive material such as personal data which is covered under the data protection act?
• How often do you carry out your backups?
• Do you use cloud hosting, if so how much do you know about where your data is stored, if anything!

Make sure your ISP is able to offer you remote backup solutions as well as other fail-over redundancy dependant on your specific needs.

Ma.gnolia had a plan; the problem was that it wasn’t up to the job. The most important is to ensure that you have a plan before you start. It’s not the most exciting part of an online venture, but it may well stop your dreams going up in smoke.

 Gordon Buxton is systems architecture expert for Oxford Internet Consultants