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'Zodiac Island' Makers Say ISP Worker Wiped an Entire Season

Posted by timothy on from the when-backup-day-comes-too-late dept.

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."

17 of 228 comments (clear)

  1. Backups by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is why you need them.

    1. Re:Backups by bmo · · Score: 4, Informative

      "Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)" - Torvalds, Linus (1996-07-20)

      --
      BMO

    2. Re:Backups by White+Flame · · Score: 3, Funny

      Good thing Torvalds never used CyberLynk's FTP hosting.

    3. Re:Backups by hairyfeet · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The sad part is if you read TFA (I know, but I got bored) then you'll see they paid for backups as part of their service agreement but the ISP lied and hadn't actually bothered to back up shit.

      Now considering how we have a "fuck everything but the quarterly earnings report!" attitude going on in businesses right now I have to wonder: How widespread is this? After all backup and the tapes or HDDs to put them on cost a pretty penny, so not actually spending that money makes your bottom line look good, at the same time saying you have a backup solution (which you charge extra for) is equally good for your bottom line.

      Now considering the fact that if these clowns would have followed best practices and changed the passwords when they fired this guy they probably STILL be getting away with charging for a service they don't actually have to incur the expense of actually providing I have to wonder, how many others are doing the same right now? I mean how many are actually gonna set up a test to see if their hosting company has the backups they say?

      It sounds to me like backup services are just one more way to cut expenses while making extra money, and sounds like it is ripe for abuse like in TFA.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  2. Torrents by White+Flame · · Score: 5, Funny

    They preserve culture.

    1. Re:Torrents by SuricouRaven · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A good point though. Businesses go out of business. Some television of the past has even been deliberatly destroyed for legal reasons, or because it is embarassing to the company today. Still more can no longer be shown for the same reason, and remains locked up in a vault somewhere. VHS tapes degrade quickly, but now the pirates have digital technology, they do serve to preserve - thousands of people with their own stores, independant, backups for each other. They can't be legally compelled to destroy anything, because they just don't care. Companies come and go, but so long as someone is willing to replace the occasional failed hard drive, a pirate collection is forever.

    2. Re:Torrents by petermgreen · · Score: 4, Insightful

      True, even a huge chunk of the classic Doctor Who episodes would have been lost, had it not been for archives abroad.

      Even with the foreign "archives" (which afaict were often just rolls of film forgotten somewhere) some are still missing and many were recovered in poor condition requiring heavy restoration.

      And IIRC we only still have the famous silent film "metropolis" because people who were contractually obliged to destroy their copies didn't actually do so.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
  3. Re:World Backup Day by toastar · · Score: 5, Funny

    Who's fucking idea was it to make April fools day World Backup day?

  4. Welcome to /. hell day!!!! by Dutchmaan · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Story post time is officially Apr. 1.... it's /. hell day...

  5. Re:Sorry, but by Eivind · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's unreasonable to "rely" on ANY backup-plan whatsoever, without actually regularily testing RESTOREs.

    If you buy backup - which is fine - make sure to actually test a restore, and do so REGULARILY.

  6. RTFA and it does not make much sense by Ecuador · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  7. Q: because it breaks the flow of a message by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 3, Funny

    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!
  8. Re:World Backup Day by Kilrah_il · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Re: April fools.
    I am now announcing that for the next 24h I will not believe any story not originating from Fox News. Since all the major (i.e. serious) papers print fake/prank stories today, I guess it's Fox's time to pull the major prank - print out a real, accurate, fact-filled news item, for once.

    --
    Whenever in an argument, remember this.
  9. The rules by sjames · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  10. Re:This is by martin-boundary · · Score: 3, Informative
    That's easy to say, but the trend is the other way. How many people here on slashdot even use gmail as their primary email provider and don't ever back up the messages?

    You might say it's not the same thing, but it's not so different for a company to keep some of their most valuable assets in the cloud in one place, and for a person to keep some of their most valuable communications and contacts in the cloud in one place.

    If something is valuable, never trust it wholly to the cloud.

  11. Re:In their defense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's fairly common practice to keep the raw video in case you need to do something with it. It's generally higher quality, free from effects and can be remixed as needed. In the event the finished product is wiped out then the show can be reproduced at some cost.

    RTFA. This was not yet a finished product. They were files that had been passed back and forth between artist/animators/etc for the last 2 years while developing the show. It was a remote, collaborative effort that was still ongoing. So these were essentially the unfinished source files that got lost. The article says that while 300GB were wiped, they only permanently lost 65GB of data. I'm assuming the other 235GB were files that the various contributors still had their own local copies of.

  12. Great security and backup practices by grapeape · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.