(Archived) Could a ma.gnolia-type catastrophe happen here?

[waderoush 0]

I would be curious to hear someone from Evernote explain what the company does to guard against a data loss on the scale of what apparently happened to bookmarking service ma.gnolia this week (see http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/ ... uffer.html) -- total loss and/or corruption of both primary and backup databases.

Granted, if Evernote users are synching their notes to their desktop/laptop, a server-side disaster wouldn't lead to total data loss. But it would be disruptive nonetheless, considering how many people (like me) are starting to store their whole lives on Evernote.

So, what kind of redundancy do you guys have? My publication was once shut down for two days due to an explosion at our hosting service, The Planet, in Houston. Which isn't the kind of thing you can plan for, but still, we cussed ourselves for not shelling out for an off-site backup server.

[engberg 89]

Our data service has a very high degree of redundancy. At all times, each bit of your data is replicated across four physical drives, split between two different systems. We also perform a nightly incremental backup onto another redundant pair of disks, which means that we have around 6 copies of yesterday's notes.

More importantly ... Evernote is not just a basic "Web 2.0" service, since you can always keep a full copy of 100% of your data on one or more of your own computers. Even if California were to fall into the sea tomorrow, every Evernote user with a desktop client would have a full working application containing your full account contents. This would work indefinitely, and there are several export formats available that would make it possible to recover your data.

If you wanted to be even more extra-safe-secure, you could back up your local client database files, or export your notes to .enex files periodically to have yet another reference copy.