Warren Benedetto's dashboard

Thank you for the transparency and the honesty. That is just a horrible thing to happen, and I feel for you. I'm struggling to efficiently back up a 4GB database on a regular basis ... I can't imagine trying to deal with that much data. Good luck with the recovery.

By some grace of God, I just recently started double-bookmarking with Ma.gnolia and Delicious through my Flock browser. Flock is a little buggy though, and it wasn't storing my tags in Ma.gnolia. Therefore, I had been leaning a little more heavily on Delicious when this happened. If I hadn't been, I'd be screwed. I sympathize with everyone who lost data.

Although I have no idea what happened, I'm guessing that there were probably backups of the data, but on the same physical drive. If the drive failed, all would be lost. A less likely scenario might be a single backup file, where the main database failed, then a backup routine ran and "backed up " the corrupted data, therefore overwriting the good backup with bad data.

I don't see the harm in telling us what really happened. Knowing the truth may not help people get their bookmarks back, but it would probably go a long way towards salvaging your reputation, and restoring confidence with your users if/when the service returns.