Tuesday, February 17, 2009, 10:50 AM PST:

Unfortunately, database file recovery has been unsuccessful and I won't be able to recover members' bookmarks from the Ma.gnolia database. This means that the public bookmark recovery tools are the only source for recovering your bookmark collections.

If you are interested in hearing more about what happened, the history of Ma.gnolia in general, and future prospects, you can watch the latest Citizen Garden podcast below, which was recorded last week. As I mention in this podcast, I am working on relaunching Ma.gnolia as a private service on a more robust infrastructure in the coming months. I'll update this page and the twitter account with those and any other developments.

Citizen Garden Episode 11: Whither Ma.gnolia? from Larry Halff on Vimeo.

Friday, February 13, 2009, 7:00 PM PST:

The data recovery folks let me know that they're still working, but I should hear more from them by Tuesday.

Monday, February 9, 2009, 3:10 PM PST:

Just posted a new bookmark recovery tool for our members who used the scheduled blog posting system.

Sunday, February 8, 2009, 9:50 PM PST:

There are now more than twice the number of bookmarks in the Web Cache recovery tool than there were on Friday. I can't guarantee results, but members may want to try again.

Friday, February 6, 2009, 6:00 PM PST:

I've been able to extract a set of public bookmarks from a cached copy of the Ma.gnolia web site, and these are now available via the Web Cache recovery tool. I'm working on expanding the size of this cache and the number of bookmarks I'll be able to provide and will update this page, the bookmark recovery tips thread at Get Satisfaction, and Twitter when I do so.

Additionally, I'm working with data recovery specialists to recover the Ma.gnolia data store; but, unfortunately I won't hear from them until next week. As with the other data recovery efforts, I'll keep you posted as to their progress I as get any updates.

Dear Ma.gnolia Members and Visitors,

So far, my efforts to recover Ma.gnolia's data store have been unsuccessful. While I'm continuing to work at it, both from the data store and other sources on the web, I don't want to raise expectations about our prospects. While certainly unanticipated, I do take responsibility and apologize for this widespread loss of data.

In this past year, many of us have seen much loss around us. While bookmarks seem small on the national or global scale, I know that many of you had built intellectual and social capital through the bookmarks, groups, and connections you made here. For those who had shown their support for Ma.gnolia by buying one or more premium feature subscriptions, that's one thing you won't be losing: refunds will be issued for those purchases within two weeks from today.

Ma.gnolia was approaching the third anniversary of its public launch; for me, it was the project and people to which I'd devoted most of my time, energy, and love for nearly four years. It's still a little too soon to give word about the return of Ma.gnolia the service and the future of the M2 project, but I will keep this site and our Twitter account updated as those decisions are made.

In the meantime, I can provide a few pointers to some resources that can help:

If you've been publishing your bookmarks through any RSS feeds or aggregation services like FriendFeed, you can re-capture some of them before those feeds expire.

We've set up a recovery tools page with several options. We're still adding more.

If you're looking for a place to start a new collection, I think Diigo is a good option to check out for its groups, cross-service posting features and attentive staff.

Further tips for recovering bookmarks can be found or posted in a thread at Ma.gnolia's page on Get Satisfaction.