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'Zodiac Island' Makers Say ISP Worker Wiped an Entire Season
itwbennett writes "The creators of 'Zodiac Island' say they lost an entire season of their syndicated children's television show after a former employee at their Internet service provider wiped out more than 300GB of video files. eR1 World Network, the show's creator, is suing the ISP, CyberLynk of Franklin, Wisconsin, and its former employee, Michael Jewson, for damages, saying CyberLynk should have done a better job of protecting its data."
This is why you need them.
I can just see the relief on their faces when they learn that the whole series is still available at yourmegasupertorrentdownload.com
They preserve culture.
I guess they didn't hear that it was World Backup Day
there is no scenario AT ALL in which this should be possible. You shoot, makes backups the same day. Edit the show on your own computers, hopefully backing up to a remote location daily, or more realistically, weekly. (Sneakernet, I'd assume.) When you're done editing your show, you want to have backups all over. Why the fuck did the ISP have control of the only copy of their show?
How ironic: http://www.worldbackupday.net/
Did these video just magically appear on the server or where they uploaded to the server after they were created somewhere else?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
... its a 1st April prank to get free publicity
This is the 21st century and some people still haven't wrapped their heads around proper safeguarding of data.
It sucks to be them, but it's their own responsibility to make sure their data is replicated on as many devices in as many places as is convenient and affordable to do so.
If the show is any good, I might have a copy on my harddisk..
Hmmm? You mean it's not about the new My Little Pony show?
Well try this then: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22zodiac+island%22+torrent
I would have loved to see "Canonical bought by Apple Inc." or "Linus Torvalds dies in skydiving incident".
Backup is a very big word, guys.
I mean, haven't you any other copy?
Who designed your production processes, Pinocchio?
Information technology is not just a bulb light that just works by plugging it in. It's (just a little bit) more complicated and yet (much) more powerful.
Shame on you, then!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Story post time is officially Apr. 1.... it's /. hell day...
At least not if this is this is a clip of the show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJfpH7K1_Qc
... don't leave it in a place where a random disaster (or random disgruntled third-party employee) can wipe it from the face of the Earth. Terabyte-size drives are cheap nowadays. Buy them. Buy many of them. Back up elements to them on a regular basis. Don't destroy raw material until the editing is done and the master has been copied at least twice purely for long-term storage, never mind how many copies need to be made available for distribution. Don't even rely on just hard disks - dump masters to tape if you can afford it. HDCAM's not completely overpriced; hell, even standard-definition Digital Betacam is better than, quite literally, nothing.
If they're lucky, the animated contributions and sound elements may be retrievable should the individuals responsible for those be more scrupulous about their material retention than the studio (the story didn't quite make clear what, if anything, they've been able to recover), but any location shooting lost is going to be a pain to redo.
This should be a very expensive lesson for their technically-inclined production crew and, if they have any, actual IT staff.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Can not wait to see the kind of complaints that arise after some twat somewhere wipes your entire life in the clouds.
Sure, 300GB is a lot of data, but it's not *that* much data. We're talking about TWO FREAKING YEARS worth of work from multiple companies and NOBODY had enough sense to back the whole thing up offline?? $50 at Fry's would easily buy you a terabyte drive. Forget the ISP, it's a total FAIL on the part of all involved I'd say.
You notice they always call it backup software, not restore software.
It sounds like their ISP was supposed to do that. I've nothing wrong with paying other companies to do something for you. Not every company has the resources to do everything. You outsource things to experts. However that means you presume they do it right, and do what they say. The ISP said "Ya no problem we back this up." And then it turned out they didn't.
I totally feel for the production company, but I have to make one point...
Why wasn't any of this stuff being copied locally? You can buy a 2TB drive for 160$. Yes it may take a goddamn month to download all of it with todays shitty american and canadian ISP's throttling, but you wouldn't lose years of work. Better yet, have someone physically go down to the ISP with a portable drive and have them copy it for you, so the most you may ever lose is whatever your time is worth.
If backup was in the contract, why wasn't the backups being tested. I know between two machines I have at one colo, it takes about 21 hours to backup 500GB of data over the GigE interface when the machine is in full use.
This means that, officially, World Backup Day has ended.
It was an off-site FTP server for collaboration, are they telling us none of the collaborators had the full set of data? It was "just" 300GB, meaning it could fit easily on an average hard drive.
Furthermore, they say they require all the data to reconstitute the episodes, so every time they needed the episodes, they would download all those 300GB of 6000+ files from FTP and rebuild their episodes? What kind of idiocy is this.
And lastly, did that employee secure erase everything? It was more than a simple rm -rf ?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
April fool!!!! Bwa, ha, ha, sucker, ha, hee, ho, ho, ho...
I have been in a situation like this, though definitely not of the same magnitude. I lost an entire year's worth of work on a non-profit site I was working on. I was under the impression that backups were being made.
I had written a simple shell script to connect to the server and backup my SQL data and other files. The problem was I hadn't run it since I started the site. Who do I blame? Me.
The funny thing is that I tend to backup religiously, but for some reason didn't backup the site's database. You can have 20 year old backups survive, even if on shoddy media, but the one time you decide not backup you're screwed.
More pertinent to the story -- I shot and edited a documentary with hours worth of footage. After every interview I would go home, plug in my DV cam, and import the video to Final Cut Express. The tape was then put away for safe keeping. Next I would backup all the capture and project files to an external hard drive. So, if I have a HD crash then the backup exists. If both hard drives die I have the original tapes. My only flaw would be keeping them all in the same building.
When the entire project was finished I backed it up in its entirety again. I can still go back to that project if I'd like. I also burnt it to a DVD, exported it back to my DV cam, and even made a Digital 8 copy. Still not satisfied I made a VHS copy, and two more 'master' copies of the DVD.
That was nearly 2 years of work, and there was no way in hell I was going to lose it. I made no money for this and had nothing material at stake. The Zodiac Island people have big money and a reputation at stake, but were not professional enough to backup? I just don't feel much pity for them; if they want to sue someone, sue the disgruntled former employee -- not the ISP.
http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/03/31/2027254/Its-World-Backup-Day
From the show website: "The stories of the twelve Kids of Zodiac Island share family values of loving, respect, and ethical behavior while learning to enjoy Nature. The loving, joyful Zodiac Kids are role models for children across the globe, and help everyone realize we are all peaceful, loving, happy beings."
So... nothing of value was lost? Sounds anvilicious to me.
http://www.zodiacisland.com/characters/index.html -- IT BURNSES ME! Really, children deserve better than that.
Definitely smells like incompetence on everyone's part, especially Cyberlinks. But to not keep a copy of your own data, but trust it entirely to a cheapo ftp site? Whoever made that decision also deserves the boot.
A: Why is starting a comment in the Subject: line incredibly irritating?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
.. that weren't being done ; a lot of management just don't want to hear that they have to actually spend money on hardware and staff to run it. Instead, squash the problem by removing that squeaky cog.
And then he made his point rather more obvious.
Just speculatin'
Obligatory pun: This is what happens when you store data into the cloud. It evaporates!
Rule 1, if you upload it to your ISP, keep a backup.
Rule 2, if they say they keep backups, keep a backup, theirs may not be very good.
Rule number 3, if they agree contracturally to make full backups, keep one of your own. They don't care as much about your stuff as you do and they probably have a get out of jail free clause buried somewhere in the fine print.
If you care about any of your data, you always have a backup offline in your own physical possession. You definitely can't trust service providers who claim they backup, often those backups are never tested and they do not function. Even if they do, what if their facility is hit by a natural disaster? Most aren't going to have an off-site backup. Moral of the story is you cannot trust anyone else to keep your data safe.
The makers of this show should have done their own backups. You can buy a 2TB drive for ~$100, fill it up and put it away for safe keep. Simple as that.
isn't today or yesterday or whatever national back up day? Ironic, Dontcha think?
Precious archival data stored in a single location on a machine that they don't control. It's not the ISP employee who should be fired...
Good luck with that. Backups are sort of like buying fire insurance aren't they? They seem like a separate service to purchase, aside from ftp hosting. Like in case something inane occurs, like for when the ftp-hosting ISP's cheap labor (allegedly) effects disks with circumstances of disgruntlement.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Ok, we get it - it's best practice to have a backup solution. They DID - they paid for it. Blaming the victim (and they were victims - they paid for a service and did not receive it) only gets you so far.
... employee's accounts immediately upon termination? Kind of a moronic oversight.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Nope.
That's the beautiful trap. Companies love to moan about how long tail materials are "too expensive to retain", meaning they're willing for it to vanish forever, but skies alive if you create a college club around it! Copyright terrorists! Sue them!
If some super-lawyer for EFF wants another angle to chip away at the copyright insanity, that might be an angle: get a statement under oath that something is "too costly to maintain", aka the retention value is negative, and then it becomes one of the CC licenses, perhaps Attribution-Only with commercial use allowed. (I don't think anyone wants to pretend that Da Mouse is their invention, they just want to make mashup derivatives.)
To my vague recall that's what started the paper shredder industry - something labeled trash is no longer fully protected property.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
BACKUP,BACKUP,BACKUP!!! Redundancy!!!! It would take an idiot to leave all their files to an ISP without having physical copies stored as well.
Amazing.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
132 on this article and not one about Michael Jewson and his criminal behavior. No, ever single one is about how the company was stupid to trust their ISP to have backups.
This shouldn't surprise me as most Slashdotters seem to approve of the kind of act Jewson committed. I have no doubt many are envious that he was able to do it while they themselves are incapable of striking back at their former employers.
3 copies
2 mediums
1 offsite
PS stop talking about 'the cloud" like it exists. It's only an abstract concept. Everything is on a real piece of hardware that will fail and controlled by a human that will f*ck up.
nobody cares about backups, but people get fired over restores.
This is why you need them.
Also, if your 320gig worth of invaluable childrens' TV show only exists on your ISPs servers, you should jump out of a high window right now because you are too stupid to live. A 320gig portable hard drive can be had at newegg for about fifty bucks. Less if you keep an eye on woot. How stupid can you be? When you edited those shows, did you wipe all your hard drives afterward? How in the hell can your only copies be on your ISP's servers?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Maybe they have a backup but saying they dont allows them to get money from the ISP?
After all 300 GB is just $50 for an external hard drive
I'd love abandonware (whether computer programs, TV programmes, films, music or books) to fall out of copyright. Proving something is abandonware is tricky. Better to significantly reduce copyright terms.
I don't think however that the BBC destroying old tapes/films because they either saved money be re-using the physical media or because they saved money by not having to store it was at any point intended to become a trap.
I suspect the BBC would admit themselves that it's a shame they can't produce a DVD with the original Doctor Who on it, or add it to iPlayer (free for UK TV licence holders).
The sad thing is, I can honestly believe this.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
And people wonder why fired IT workers are escorted to the door without being allowed to go back to their desks. All it takes is one idiot to make the rest of the company completely paranoid from that point forward. First rule of IT Staffing: When someone leaves...make sure their access leaves with them. The lack of backups however is inexcusable.
Jesus and Satan are arguing about who is the better programmer so they decide to have a competition. For the sake of argument let's say they're supposed to write a log(log(n)) sorting program.
They both type furiously for a few minutes and then Jesus leans back and smiles. Satan continues typing when suddenly the power goes out.
Both computers shut down and Satan starts cursing like a sailor.
When he notices that Jesus seems undisturbed he asks, "What the hell are you smiling about?"
He replies, "Jesus saves."
What was in the terms regarding storage of the data and CyberLynk and World Network, the show's creator?
This is why you need them. Stop hiring people with basket weaving degrees and hire some real people. Its your own fault.
Oh look, it's the April Fool.
If only you'd go away for the rest of the year, I think I could stand you.
Not too long ago one of my friends brought me his dead back-up drive. He was really upset that the drive failed. I told him that drives fails, and that is why you are supposed to keep a back up copy of you data on a separate drive. To which he replied, but I only have the one copy. It's on my back-up drive.
With Jewson, you lose some.
Rule 4: Make sure you know the sales person's personal information -- home phone number, home address, name of wife and kids, car make, model & tag.
Rule 5: Make sure you know same about owner.
When they screw up on this scale, have your "consultants" make unannounced solo visits to places they park their car to discuss how their company will make up for your loss.
Be sure your consultants are unknown to company officials but address them on a friendly, first-name basis, and let them know that the "recent data loss is totally unacceptable." Assure them you know that they will "make sure they have the first cash payment of $50,000 ready by Friday" and that to keep things convenient, you're willing to "pick it up at their cute house on Elm Lane with the patio in the back yard or perhaps at the daycare or school little Johnny attends."
This lets them know you care about them and have all of their most important interests at heart and that while you understand this might require some short-term sacrifices on their part, by making you whole again, you're willing to help keep them safe.
...
The fault lies on the idiots who didn't back their shit up before putting it on another person's server.
andnothingofvaluewaslost
I suspect the BBC would admit themselves that it's a shame they can't produce a DVD with the original Doctor Who on it
The very first Doctor Who story is complete in the archives (as is the original unaired pilot) and has been released on DVD, as have several other First Doctor stories. AFAIK if anything it's the Second Doctor's stories that suffered the most from this phenomenon- some exist complete, but a very high percentage are partially or completely wiped.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
nuff said...
Actually, the interesting thing about piracy is how it enables easier preservation. Storing widely shared rips of films in open formats is a very redundant way to ensure old films don't get lost.
I recall that Max Payne 2 on Steam uses the Myth cracked exe; You used to be able to see the Myth logo inside the actual exe but they patched it out. I'm fairly certain I've heard of other instances where cracked exes have been used in digital releases of old DRMed games.
Nick
Oh - I wasn't thinking of the BBC - that incident dates from an earlier time. I am thinking of much more recent examples.
If I recall, on the Baen Library one of the editorials remarked that "it was too much work to fix up out of print novels to bring them back into print vs the expected sales". Also see the music industry (!) - why should anything be out of print in that field ever?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine