Popular online note-taking service Evernote suffered a hardware fault that could have resulted in data loss for thousands of its users. One of its fail-over clusters, which consists of two servers, apparently encountered a failure condition. This caused the servers to take turns to fail-over, causing some of the data created in the interim to be overwritten.

Evernote CEO Phil Libin told CNET that of the 6,232 users affected by this outage, approximately 70 percent were able to recover their data. This means that some users may have lost data as a result, in spite of a regime of multiple on-site and off-site backups.

Without addressing whether the data loss was even acceptable, for the moment, Libin told CNET that the probability of it happening again is unlikely. "This was a freak of hardware failures. But we've changed the fail-over process so it won't happen again," he said.

While I don't use Evernote on a regular basis, this is a somber reminder that we should backup the data that is truly important to us. You can read more about what happened in Evernote's blog post.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at CNET News 

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