If you haven’t heard – Ma.gnolia – the online bookmarking service experiences that horrible event everyone fears – database corruption, and total loss of data. Not just the “primary” database – they lost their backups as well! Needless to say, that sucks. At the very least, their home page now has an apology explaining that it’ll take days to get things sorted out. I wish them and their crew the best of luck. Those situations always suck, are never fun, and no doubt is causing a lot of lost sleep.
I’m not a Ma.gnolia user. I don’t know why I never joined – I was always a del.icio.us user and never felt the need to change to another service – I just needed something that let me access my bookmarks wherever, and I used it even moreso when the firefox plugin came out. I tag, I comment, I move on. I used to publish a collection of my recent links, but they were out numbering my posts.
Needless to say, Ma.gnolia’s issues made we wonder about the safety of my own bookmarks – I don’t back them up. Now sounds like a great time to find out!
Delicious Backups
The easiest, most obvious method is going to “Settings -> Export” – you can include your tags and comments, should you want, and it’ll spit out one humongous HTML file.
After a little googling, I found out from eConsultant that you can use this file a few sites:
It’s possible to output your bookmarks in XML using their API – but they ask that you use it sparingly.
Now, the additional “very cool thing” – they have a collection of third party plug-ins you can use – we’re talking plugin importers, API calls to PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, Perl, Lisp, C# and MySQLicious – that last one I’m interested in, possibly as making it a permanent addition to my main server!
