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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."

9 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. 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. 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.
  5. 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.

  6. 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.