Imagine my horror when I clicked on the Magnolia home page this morning and found this message:

Dear Ma.gnolia Community Members or Visitor,

Early on the West-coast morning of Friday, January 30th, 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.

Magnolia has been down for most of the day and I’m devastated.  It’s not unusual for me to add one or more bookmarks each day to my Magnolia account.  And I refer to my bookmarks constantly.  For example, while preparing for my presentation on tech trends and their impact on small associations, I scoured my bookmarks under the tags of statistics and tech trends.

My husband says I should have used Delicious all along, but really, this outage could have happened to any of the free, hosted sites.

Matrix Group offers a hosted membership database solution for associations (MatrixMaxx) and we work very hard to and spend good money to make sure we have good, reliable and redundant back-ups.  Our clients expect nothing less from us because their applications and data are mission-critical.

But what kind of expectations can I have/should I have re: back-up from a free, hosted service like Magnolia? Can I really be pissed off that my bookmarks are gone when I haven’t paid Magnolia a dime?  And if Magnolia does recover, will I trust them with my bookmarks again?  Ugh.

You’ll be glad to know that there is a whole movement devoted to changing the content of the Internet from ephemera to artifacts. Internet libraries are springing up everywhere to catalog and preserve Web pages, images, even audio and video files.

The largest (I think) Internet Library is the Internet Archive, a “nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free and openly accessible online digital library, including an archive of Web.” The archive is a collection of snapshots of Web pages from the around the world, taken at various points in time.

Use the Wayback Machine, type in your company’s URL and try not to cringe as you browse pages from five years ago. Check out the archive for the Matrix Group Web site; talk about a trip down memory lane.

The Internet Archive also has special Web collections (or links) for specific topics, like the Asian Tsunami or the 2002 Election. Just think about how much content is online from this year’s election and how much of the news and information you relied on to make your choice is online. The question is: will it be online next year and what will we have lost as a society when that content is gone?

Other terrific Internet libraries include:

• Online Computer Library Center
• Alexa Internet
• Library of Congress
• Project Gutenberg
  
• World Digital Library
• Alexandria Digital Library

In addition, Google takes a snapshot of each page it examines and caches (stores) that version as a back-up. That’s why every search results page on Google has a link to the page and the cached version, which is what Google indexes and searches.

Thank goodness for libraries!

Last week, I went to pick up my son from his preschool. As soon as I walked in, the preschool Director came up to me, surprisingly calm for the news she was about to deliver. She said “My computer won’t boot ever since the power outage last week. Can you help?” She had a back-up of her work, but it was not current. (Rule number one: keep a current back-up of your PC and network.)

I told my husband, the “real techie in the family,” about the dead computer and he agreed to look at it. The prognosis was not good. The machine would not even recognize the drive, which was clicking sadly away. A senior network administrator came up with the same, bad news. Diagnostic tests would not revive the hard drive, either.

I was resigned to tell the preschool Director the sad news, when I remembered the urban legend about putting a dead drive in the freezer to revive it. I told my husband, who looked at me funny, but heck, we had nothing to lose.

We put the hard disk in the freezer. BTW, if you try this, make sure you put the hard drive in a freezer bag. The bag protects the electronics in your drive from moisture and condensation, which could cause more damage, not that it matters if the drive is truly dead. We left the drive in the freezer for over 24 hours.

On Saturday, my husband went into work. He called me and said, “you will never believe this, but I am pulling data off the drive.” No kidding. He was able to pull all the data off the drive and load it onto a new drive. Everything was restored, no data lost. CJ’s teacher was delighted, shocked and amazed.

As for the drive, once it was rebooted, it was dead again, would not boot, could not be recognized by the PC. So if you try this, be prepared to grab the data right away and do not expect the old drive to work.

It seems the urban legend is true! You can revive a hard drive long enough to retrieve your precious data. Of course, this trick will not work if the drive is damaged or burned out. I looked online and found lots of references to the urban legend. Check it out:

Discussion forum on CNET

Geeks are sexy blog

Amazing, but true. Let me know if you’ve tried this trick and what the result was. If you know of other techie urban legends that are actually true, I’d love to hear about them.