Ma.gnolia Data is Gone For Good

Re:Ma.gnolia Data is Gone For Good by KirinDave on Thursday February 19, 2009 @02:28PM (#487697)

I don't want to throw rocks, because I used to work for Larry (in fact, I wrote the original codebase for Ma.gnolia.com) and I like him.

But I distinctly remember talking about backups and how a raw sync of the innodb files wasn't really what we needed (it could sort of work in the original deploy of ma.gnolia, but would not scale as the site scaled). I'm kind of surprised that the community has been so tolerant of this failure. Personally, I'd be furious if I found out that a site I trusted lost all my data because they hadn't even tested their backup system.

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Re:Ma.gnolia Data is Gone For Good by fendale on Thursday February 19, 2009 @03:10PM (#487762)

> I'd be furious if I found out that a site I trusted lost all my data because they hadn't even tested their backup system

Exactly - first rule of backups - test them. For a database, it can be as simple as using your nightly backup to create your dev or test database or whatever. I guess it isn't feasible with a half terrabyte database every day, but to not have at least a several week old backup set is somewhat unforgivable.

On the other hand, I bet he will never ever make the same mistake again, and it will make a lot of people on here think long and hard about their own backup strategies ...

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Re:Ma.gnolia Data is Gone For Good by whatusername on Thursday February 19, 2009 @07:49PM (#488107)

I've seen that kinda setup done nicely..

Daily automated DB Backup. Daily automated DB restore to a seperate server. (Which also can kinda double as a hot spare as required.)

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Re:Ma.gnolia Data is Gone For Good by look_lookatme on Thursday February 19, 2009 @05:24PM (#487961)

You may not want to get into this, but why was the database half a terabyte anyway? That seems like a shitload of data for a site like ma.gnolia.

My best guess is the link screenshots were being stored in the DB.

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Re:Ma.gnolia Data is Gone For Good by woadwarrior01 on Thursday February 19, 2009 @08:44PM (#488153)

Or could it be that half a gig was just a figure he came up with to demonstrate the (ostensible) difficulty in doing a proper backup ?

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Re:Ma.gnolia Data is Gone For Good by look_lookatme on Thursday February 19, 2009 @11:10PM (#488280)

Well, half a gig is trivial to backup. Half a terabyte is not. Assuming you meant to say 500 gigs, then yes, there is difficulty, but it's not uncharted territory. He had two xserves -- perfect for replication.

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Re:Ma.gnolia Data is Gone For Good by gaius on Friday February 20, 2009 @05:13AM (#488555)

It's not even close to uncharted territory. You can walk into any Apple store and buy a 1-terabyte backup device off the shelf.

OK so it won't handle your databases properly but that's not the point; 500G is not a troublesome amount of data these days.

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Re:Ma.gnolia Data is Gone For Good by look_lookatme on Friday February 20, 2009 @02:05PM (#489081)

No the point is backing up a 500G database is difficult, but not unpossible. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

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