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posted by martyb on Monday February 13 2017, @03:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-long-would-it-take-for-YOU-to-restore-a-backup? dept.

Link bookmarking service Instapaper came back online today following a critical database issue that forced it offline for 31 hours over the past two days. According to two blog posts [1, 2] detailing what happened, on February 8, 2016, at around 21:00 GMT, Instapaper's main database mindbogglingly filled up without anyone noticing, and stopped allowing users to save new links to their accounts.

Instapaper developers said that neither its staff or its cloud provider noticed that the database was nearing full capacity, so nobody took precautions to migrate the Instapaper database to a larger server beforehand. When it happened, the service was left with one option, and that was to export all Instapaper content and move it to a new server. Both operations were extremely slow, as most database migration processes generally are.

Instapaper came back online earlier today, on February 10, 2017, at around 3:00 GMT, after a massive and embarrassing 31-hour downtime. Nonetheless, the service isn't 100% yet. Instapaper staff says they only imported a small fraction of the user data into the new database. "In the interest of coming back up as soon as possible, this [database] instance only has the last six weeks of articles," Instapaper staff wrote. "For now, anything you've saved since December 20, 2016 is accessible."

The service expects to restore all data by February 17, next week, a whopping nine days after service went down.

Source:
  https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/instapaper-needs-one-week-to-restore-full-service-after-31-hour-downtime/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @04:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @04:05PM (#466628)

    Well, looking at Wikipedia (it's the first time I heard about Instapaper), it seems that this service doesn't store just the link, but the actual page (how they keep out of copyright issues, I have no idea). Which means that it provides a bit more than synchronized bookmarks, and also explains how their databases could fill up (I think unless you're storing the whole database on a single SD card, it's hard to fill it up with links only).