“Ma.gnolia Suffers Major Data Loss, Site Taken Offline”, 2009-01-30 (; backlinks):
There was a meltdown at bookmark sharing website Ma.gnolia Friday morning. The service lost both its primary store of user data, as well as its backup. The site has been taken offline while the team tries to reconstruct its databases, though some users may never see their stored bookmarks again. The failure appears to be catastrophic. The company can’t say to what extent it will be able to restore any of its users’ data. It also says the data failure was so extensive, repairing the loss will take “days, not hours.”
…Ma.gnolia is a free, public service for saving links to websites. Most users rely on it as a bookmarking storage service, or a place to save links that they may want to revisit later. Links can be saved privately or shared publicly, so that they can be browsed by other users looking for new destinations. Many people prefer to use bookmark sharing services like Ma.gnolia rather than saving bookmarks locally—the main advantage being that while your browser’s bookmarks are stored on your machine, you can access bookmarks you share on the web from any computer with an internet connection. Ma.gnolia’s main competitor is Delicious.com, which is owned by Yahoo. Ma.gnolia is preferred by many of the web’s tech elite for 2 reasons: The site has a robust and easy-to-use API for accessing stored data, and it takes a snapshot when you create a bookmark, so even if the linked site disappears, Ma.gnolia enables you to access a cached version.
[The half terabyte of link data for the several hundred thousand users was permanently lost; Ma.gnolia several months later rebooted but then shut down permanently in September 2010. The domain now redirects to a fashion retail website; all links were irrevocably broken.]