Toodledo is Toodle-Down and I Need My Data
My online task manager of choice has been Toodledo for at least the last year or so. I love it because it has a nice clean interface, which is extremely user friendly and accessible. Well, last night, I tried to access my Toodledo account, only to find this message:
So, here’s the story. A big storm went through the city where our datacenter is located. The datacenter decided to proactively switch to generators. During the switch, something got screwed up, and the power went off for a few minutes. As (bad) luck would have it, this caused our database to get corrupted. We are currently working to bring it back online and restored from the live backup. The crack team at Rackspace is on the job. Thanks Rackspace! Unfortunately, the database is so large, that it will take some time to transfer and verify all the data. Hopefuly not more than a few hours. We know that this is very bad, and we apologize for any inconvience that this will cause. Please check the forums when we are back online for a full report.
Uh-oh. Storms and servers obviously do not mix. An update this morning indicated that things were taking longer to fix than expected.
This is a real problem for me as I use Toodledo extensively to keep track of numerous pending tasks at JAMM, as well as in my personal life. And I think this lends itself to a reminder of the importance of having offline access to your data.
Offline access has been one of my big complaints about Toodledo from the beginning. With the exception of the iphone app, there is no opportunity to access your data offline from your desktop, netbook, mobile device, or any other platform. I know from their forums that this has been a growing source of frustration for other users as well.
Hopefully this will be an area Toodledo can address in the near future. I suspect many users will become increasingly irritated by their inability to access important data. As my friend, Dan, pointed out, if you have offline access and your server crashes, users will only lose the data they entered since their last sync. Without offline access, however, users will lose all of their data, which is a great way to lose customers when something like a server crash occurs.
So, hurry back, Toodledo. I will still be waiting when your servers are repaired. But when you return, I hope you will take a closer look at offline applications and syncing so that this kind of occurrence will be made less painful for your users in the future.
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