Popplet Loses Users’ Data

It’s a strange situation.

The other day, Monday, I started using a service called Popplet, that supports a mind-map-ish sort of presentation making and sharing, something like Prezi. Just after I created the first draft of a mind map related to my Social Cognition research initiative, I shared the link with Jorgen van der Sloot of Freedomlab.org, where I am a researcher-in-residence this year. 

When I tired to return to edit, later in the day, I was unable to. And now it seems the worst has happened:

Dear Popplet User,

As you know, Popplet’s servers went offline at 5:35 AM, Tuesday, February 1, 2011. We had been working hard on the problem when we received the first reports of missing data on the day before, but what we discovered was a much bigger issue than we had at first anticipated. As a result, we have kept Popplet offline until we could determine the scope of the data corruption in our system and, to our dismay, our backups as well.

Popplet has experienced a completely unanticipated database issue. Currently we are faced with the difficult proposition of either waiting longer to try to recover more data or bringing the system online with what we have recovered. We are doing everything we can to bring back all of your hard work, but we also want to bring the service online as soon as possible.

We do know this: data has been lost, and we apologize deeply for this. 

We value your data and used best practices to preserve it and back it up, including using 3 persistent EC2 instances backed by EBS volumes, backed up every night to S3. In our worst case scenario, we imagined that we might lose 24 hours of data, but in this case, the corruption in our data was undetected and passed into our backup system.

We know that you have been relying on Popplet for your daily work, assignments and presentations. At Popplet, we use popplet ourselves for our own workflows, and we have lost our own data. Being in Beta, we knew we might run into some bumps in the road, but we truly didn’t expect to be putting our users in this situation. We wish more than anything to be able to retrieve everyone’s data and are working around the clock to find a solution. We want to be transparent about the severity of this issue and how hard we have been trying to get everything back.

We will send out a tweet when the system is back online. If you have lost data or are unable to log in to your account, email us at support@popplet.com by February 18 to report the issue. We will do what we can to make up for this serious incident. 

Please accept our deepest apologies and we sincerely hope you stay with us and continue to use Popplet. 

Sincerely,

The Popplet Team:

Jared, Albert, Phillip, Tom, Young, Steve and Asli

My situation is minuscule relative to others who might have had dozens or more popplets. I have only one, and a first draft at that. 

But I wonder about an organization that doesn’t have a shadowed database from a few weeks ago. Especially in a world where we watched the Magnolia episode. And Popplet doesn’t — as I recall — support an option for users to backup copies of their work offline, either.