ON TYPEPAD OUTAGES AND WEB 2.0 MORTALITY

RAINY DAYS

(UPDATE:  More details on the Typepad problems from Niall Kennedy)

Typepad, one of the largest keeper of millions of blogs large and small, was down for most of the day.  Although most frustrating to regular bloggers, and at most puzzling to many regular readers of blogs, all blogs on Typepad got "rolled back" to December 10th or 11th, as Typepad tried to make the best of a bad situation.

For most of the day, it was hard to find what was wrong.  Only later this afternoon did the company acknowledge the situation by putting a link to the STATUS page on the front page.  As they explained when you finally got to that page:

"we are displaying backup copies of weblogs from a few days ago, so some of your newest content may not be showing"

For many regular bloggers, this outage likely raised a question for the first time, as it did for me. 

"Did I lose my content from the last few days forever?"

It wasn't until much,  much later in the afternoon, that Typepad officials deigned to put up the following assurance:

"We want you to know that your blog data is safe. We have no reason to believe that any of your posts, comments, TrackBacks, photos or files have been lost. Over the weekend we will be restoring any photos or files you uploaded over the past several days."

And even then it had the caveat of "we have no reason to believe...", which of course was very re-assuring.

And Typepad itself has had infrastructure ramping issues for most of the year now, as I've posted on before (here, here, and here).  But this time was different.

Most of us have learned to back up our stuff on PCs and software, over the years, because, well, PCs and software CRASH from time to time.

But we hadn't really considered backing up our stuff on  web-based networks, because, well, it's web-based! 

We'd just assumed it was constantly backed up and protected as well if not better than the gold in Fort Knox.

So many of us confronted our "blog mortality" for the first time today.  We thought our blog were immortal.

We think our STUFF online is immortal, especially in a Web 2.0 world. 

How many of us think about backing up our Flickr photos? Or Del.icio.us tags? Or our hosted podcasts? And tomorrow's VideoBlogs?

This is different than the dial-up crisis that AOL and other access services had during periods of high demand in the nineties, and the occasional day-long outages they suffered.  And it wasn't just access services, but commerce services like eBay and others as well.  In those cases, we lost access to services that were important to our daily lives. 

But in most cases it was like a power or a cable TV outage.

This was like having a fire and losing stuff in your home or office, and realizing you didn't make copies of important stuff.

Things won't be normal for Typepad users for a few days, but today was a wake-up call.

Comments

[mark baraz]

michael,

i actually had tried to sort out exactly how to back up/export both my del.ici.ous bookmarks and my wordpress based blog, and it is not obvious to me how to do either. anyone have any suggestions?

thanks

mark

[Mathew Ingram]

Mark -- there is a backup plugin for Wordpress here, but I should say that I haven't tried it (I'm going to though). As for del.icio.us, there's some info here

[BillSaysThis]

I use the WP plugins (wp-db-backup and wp-cron) from skippy.net for backing up the WP db, have for months now, and they do a satisfactory job for me. Note that while this will handle most of the blog matter it doesn't backup your templates and other file changes so you may want to set up a periodic tar + email to yourself cron job too.

[Tim]

Interesting coincidence, del.icio.us has been down for several hours.

[Alterion]

the irony.. now del.icio.us is down.. i had assumed now that they were owned by yahoo that they'ed be safe forevermore... but i've made sure i have hard copies of all my flickr photo's now

[timb]

you can export your stuff from del.icio.us as a single html file under "settings". (sorry about our servers exploding)