MySpace Has Reportedly Lost All Photos, Videos and Songs Uploaded Over 12 Years Due To Data Corruption During a Server Migration Project (cnet.com)

MySpace may have lost your digital memories in a server migration. From a report: "As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace," it said in a note at the top of the site. "We apologize for the inconvenience. If you would like more information, please contact our Data Protection Officer at DPO@myspace.com."

Andy Baio, one of the people behind Kickstarter, tweeted that it could mean millions of songs uploaded between the site's Aug. 1, 2003 launch and 2015 are gone for good. "Myspace accidentally lost all the music uploaded from its first 12 years in a server migration, losing over 50 million songs from 14 million artists," he wrote Sunday. "I'm deeply skeptical this was an accident. Flagrant incompetence may be bad PR, but it still sounds better than 'we can't be bothered with the effort and cost of migrating and hosting 50 million old MP3s,'" Baio noted.

Comments

You know the saying

[Anonymous Coward]

...and nothing of value was lost.

Okay but

[AmiMoJo]

nothing of value was lost?

To be honest I thought the whole site was gone years ago, or was that Geocities?

Re:Okay but

[Narcocide]

They had already previously deleted a bunch of idle accounts, I thought I had heard. So if you hadn't logged in for years, you probably had lost all your stuff before this.

Re:Okay but

[sg_oneill]

nothing of value was lost?

Um. No. Before Bandcamp and Facebook, MySpace was *the* social network used by musicians for promotion and putting out music. Sure it was an absolute crime against good taste, but it was where you had to be. Shit, towards the end, if you didn't have a bunch of thousand followers, no bar would give you a gig (Guess where the "Buy likes" industry came from). It was a horrible system, BUT, there was a lot of important music from bands that had finished so never set up a bandcamp, soundcloud or facebook account. And now its gone. Millions of songs from bands around the world.

Its a modern day burning of the Alexandria Library, A lot of history just got killed.

Re:Okay but

[Anonymous Coward]

To put it a more PRECISE way - finally they deleted stuff they SHOULD've deleted years ago.

It's far more terrifying digital data exists (forever) than stuff is "lost" on accounts people haven't used for years.

We should do a modern day book burning where these companies Office Space on their printers (but instead, their storage media) and shred them one a year.

Re:Okay but

[Vegan Cyclist]

Don't forget MP3.com, they didn't have a 'buy likes' feature, but there was a pretty healthy 'trade plays' market, since they were paying per play. I actually made a little coin until they realized it couldn't be sustained.

Re:Okay but

[Anonymous Coward]

If it wasn't important or good enough to be somewhere besides fucking Myspace by now, it wasn't worth saving.

History doesn't care about the vapid garbage some college kid with a guitar shat out to try and get laid.

Re:Okay but

[Anonymous Coward]

• 2005, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, $580m
• 2007, Yahoo! merger valuation, $12 billion
• 2011, Specific Media Group/Justin Timberlake, $35 million
• 2019, oops, $45 worth of cat videos

Re:Okay but

[SeaFox]

nothing of value was lost?

Actually the opposite for MySpace. Everything of value was lost. Since no one has used the site in years they just deleted all the content of their heyday.

Re:Okay but

[thegarbz]

Its a modern day burning of the Alexandria Library, A lot of history just got killed.

Oh please. MySpace was not ever an archive. It was a place for bands to spread a couple of their tracks. It is the modern day burning down of your favourite pub, nothing more. A venue for discovering a couple of bands has been lost. If those bands were worth while they either have published music, moved on to other platforms, or bothered to actually save copies of their songs on their computers.

Comparing it to one of the most significant archives of history is beyond asinine.

Re: Okay but

[Anonymous Coward]

Bingo. It's like moaning that someone threw away your collection of plastic bags from old, out of business shops. No one cares.

Re:Okay but

[Anonymous Coward]

Any *good* music will still exist in other places, the rest was shite.

Comic Book guy replied,

[magusxxx]

"Biggest-Takedown-Notice-Ever."

Re:Comic Book guy replied,

[Anonymous Coward]

MySpace investor Justin Timberlake was overheard lamenting that he can no longer "Bring Sexy Back."

conctact Jason Scott

[Anonymous Coward]

he might have already pillaged everything and might be able to get it back to them!

If they still have a stock price....

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't this tank it? Losing 12 years worth of data implies they don't have backups or a backup strategy to reintegrate data from the legacy backup tapes.

This is so incompetent it isn't even funny for the predecessor to facebook's success.

Re:If they still have a stock price....

[Anonymous Coward]

Any data more than 3 years old was lost. The data from the last 3 years was retained, which is where the company's continued and future value lies. The only question is whether the data older than 3 years had significant enough value among its current user base to disenfranchise its current users.

Re:If they still have a stock price....

[HornWumpus]

Somebody was using Myspace in the last 3 years?

Re:If they still have a stock price....

[Anonymous Coward]

Please have this accident at youtube next.

They were still around?

[Daerath]

The real story is that MySpace is still operational at all. I thought it shut down years ago.

Re:They were still around?

[AvitarX]

And apparently something has been uploaded in the last 3 years.

I'm highly skeptical of that though.

Re:They were still around?

[c]

And apparently something has been uploaded in the last 3 years.

Nothing's been uploaded in the last 3 years; they just don't want to say outright that they lost everything.

The bigger story...

[The Grim Reefer]

I think the bigger story here is that Myspace is still around. Or that it's still around and someone thought it was worth moving to a new server.

Re:The bigger story...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. You're only the 15th person to post that. And they say that being a pothead doesn't affect the user's mental agility.... sheesh.

Re:The bigger story...

[Anonymous Coward]

They changed into a music and entertainment site over a social media site years ago. Another way to follow celebrities.

Needful Doers Strike Again!

[Anonymous Coward]

Needful doers strike again! When will people learn?

Re: Needful Doers Strike Again!

[Anonymous Coward]

But they only charged $4/hr - so it must have been a good deal!

Nothing of value was lost

[Anonymous Coward]

Good riddance to asocial media narcissism. Hopefully this will be a wake up call to the last holdouts on MySpace, whoever they happen to be.

Go out and smell the flowers. That was good advice I don't hear anymore. It is a saying worth resurrecting.

p.s. buildings are designed too airtight these days, and the air becomes miserably stuffy, open up a window and let in more oxygen from time to time even if it is too hot or cold outside. The breath of fresh air is worth it.

Captcha: outrage (lol!)

Re:Nothing of value was lost

[bobstreo]

Good riddance to asocial media narcissism. Hopefully this will be a wake up call to the last holdouts on MySpace, whoever they happen to be.

Go out and smell the flowers. That was good advice I don't hear anymore. It is a saying worth resurrecting.

p.s. buildings are designed too airtight these days, and the air becomes miserably stuffy, open up a window and let in more oxygen from time to time even if it is too hot or cold outside. The breath of fresh air is worth it.

Captcha: outrage (lol!)

It's 30F outside and snowing. While there were some flowers, they're under the snow, and the early spring flowers usually don't have much fragrance.

I won't open the windows and (try to) heat the outside. Apparently we already have enough climate change issues, and I don't want my KWH and natural gas bills any higher, thanks.

Re:Nothing of value was lost

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhhh. You are experiencing global cooling, not global warming.

Hope this helps!

Re:Nothing of value was lost

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

It is local cooling, actually.

Nothing of value

[Confused]

It happened before and it'll happen again. Although all the companies talk a good game about how safe their storage is, in reality archiving your old stuff is really hard.

* I still have a box full of 5"1/4 floppy disk, some hard sectored.
* I have more than a few boxes of cds, many of them so badly aged that I can't read them any more.
* I have a few account son platforms where I'm not even sure they still exist. Some were secure picture storage.
* I have a few boxes of old photographs
* I have a few boxes of super 8 films
* I even have a box of VHS cassettes with stuff I care about.
* No vinyl disk left, I sold those. In retrospective, probably a bad idea. Some of the songs on those seem to be lost.
* A cupboard full of paper with stuff from school and university.

Of all those things, I guess the box of photographs and the super 8 films have the best chance of surviving me and of interest to my future grand-children. Most digital media is already lost today to me. For the rest, I just hope there's no fire and no flood.

On a larger scale, enormous amounts of knowledge and art has been lost due to fires and wars affecting libraries and museums. Last famous occurrence was probably all the stuff destroyed wilfully in Cambodia and in Iraq.

So MySpace losing a few boxs of memories of people who mostly can't even remember they had it is sad, but nothing tragic or surprising.

Get used it it.

Re:Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

That'll be fun when the fungus eats your 5.25" disks (Yes, this happens a lot). You can also expect those disks to have degraded with time and ambient flux as well. Just sitting there, they will degrade, even if they literally don't rot first.

I'm serious about the fungus/mold btw. It's a thing on old disks, worth checking before you spin them in a drive!

captcha: 'diskette'. Lol. I'm sure someone is having fun with captchas

Re:Nothing of value

[fahrbot-bot]

It happened before and it'll happen again.

Thanks Mr. Heston. :-)

Re:Nothing of value

[Nidi62]

On a larger scale, enormous amounts of knowledge and art has been lost due to fires and wars affecting libraries and museums. Last famous occurrence was probably all the stuff destroyed wilfully in Cambodia and in Iraq.

Don't forget last year's fire in Brazil's National Museum. Out of roughly 20 million artifacts housed at the museum, so far they've recovered about 2000 that survived. That's .01%.

Re:Nothing of value

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I got 2400 feet of half an inch spool recorded at a breath taking 6250 Bytes per inch by VAX 11-780. It has a FORTRAN pre-processor I wrote in 1984 to add constructs like repeat until (){}, do while (){} to FortranIV written in FortranIV. My own syntax.

Wish I can read that code once again.

Re:Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

It happened before and it'll happen again. Although all the companies talk a good game about how safe their storage is, in reality archiving your old stuff is really hard.

* I still have a box full of 5"1/4 floppy disk, some hard sectored.
* I have more than a few boxes of cds, many of them so badly aged that I can't read them any more.
* I have a few account son platforms where I'm not even sure they still exist. Some were secure picture storage.
* I have a few boxes of old photographs
* I have a few boxes of super 8 films
* I even have a box of VHS cassettes with stuff I care about.
* No vinyl disk left, I sold those. In retrospective, probably a bad idea. Some of the songs on those seem to be lost.
* A cupboard full of paper with stuff from school and university.

Of all those things, I guess the box of photographs and the super 8 films have the best chance of surviving me and of interest to my future grand-children. Most digital media is already lost today to me. For the rest, I just hope there's no fire and no flood.

On a larger scale, enormous amounts of knowledge and art has been lost due to fires and wars affecting libraries and museums. Last famous occurrence was probably all the stuff destroyed wilfully in Cambodia and in Iraq.

So MySpace losing a few boxs of memories of people who mostly can't even remember they had it is sad, but nothing tragic or surprising.

Get used it it.

Get used to what exactly? Painful levels of procrastination?

It would probably take you less than $500 and a couple of hours to find a company that would digitize all the data sitting on outdated formats that you seemingly want to lose. "Get used to it" reeks of ignorance. Let's stop pretending like we haven't invented shit like media conversion, high-speed scanners, or redundant cloud backup.

Most digital media is already lost today to me.

In the year 2019 the modern desktop PC still has the ability to read (and in many cases, write) CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray, 3.5" floppies (USB floppy drive), and almost any format of USB mass storage device made in the last 20+ years. Apart from magnetic tape (which I've already identified the solution for that problem), I fail to see how "most" digital media is lost to you.

Re:Nothing of value

[chrism238]

Get used it it.

Indeed; and who can forget The Big One from 2007?
https://www.theonion.com/break...

Re:Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

So MySpace losing a few boxs of memories of people who mostly can't even remember they had it is sad, but nothing tragic or surprising.

I agree, but I think you're Confused.

--
p.s. Did you see what I just did there? X^D

Re:Nothing of value

[jellomizer]

I always equate people issue with someone hosting your data to be like flying.
While the math shows you are much safer with your data in the cloud, vs you doing it yourself. There isn't a 100% chance your data will stay with the cloud company. And like with an aircraft or a bus, when there is an accident, the loss is huge.
However with people trying to hold onto their data themselves, there is a much higher chance that it will go away. Disk Rot, CDs getting discolored or scratched, Flooding, over heating, fire...
Sure if you dedicate a good portion of your life to make sure your personal data is secure, you will probably be better off then a cloud company, but that would require, a lot of money in infrastructure, climate controlled buildings, Server area, to support older media storage, RAID storage, that need to be managed and upgraded.

Re:Nothing of value

[Kjella]

On a larger scale, enormous amounts of knowledge and art has been lost due to fires and wars affecting libraries and museums. Last famous occurrence was probably all the stuff destroyed wilfully in Cambodia and in Iraq.

Art, yes. An original statue, temple, painting or artifact can never be truly replaced by photographs and descriptions. But knowledge of any real significance? We're increasingly preserving every bit of trivia about the world and digitizing historical records to the point that you can go swimming in an ocean of history. Go to project Gutenberg and you'll find many works I very much doubt saw any contemporary popularity, but as long as one copy survives conservationists will add it to the historical record. Same with artists, you can find much more obscure bands on Spotify than I ever saw in a retail store. And from the 21st century they'll have YouTube, recording a zillion minutes of unimportant people doing unimportant things.

Yes, it takes a bit of effort but most people "outsource" that to Facebook, Instagram, iCloud and whatever. Before, if people had a fire they typically did lose everything. Now it's like you lose memorabilia and stuff but most people have the photos stored in the cloud. And a lot of people have private off-site backups too, of course. And that's private individuals, if this is your business and it's just documents and things that fit on a thumbnail... I don't know that we've ever like completely lost a big chunk of our past.

Re: Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

And nothing of value was lost. Saving literally every piece of information is not sane, nor necessary.

Re:Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately every new drive I have purchased has been significantly bigger than the previous - so I have a whole multi-level strata of data that looks something like this
documents -> old pc->emergency_backup 2016->old_laptop 2010->old data -> backup 2001 -> 1996 backup
etc.
It's like digital archaeology trying to find anything though - especially since it's not just a simple straight chain like this, but often several backups at the same level, various "emergency backups" when there was a hard drive failing or something like that, etc.

I'm sure if I dig down far enough I'll find some old stuff in pascal from Uni, 30 years ago. I still have a lot of the drives too, though of course many are now unreadable

The biggest risk to my data now is losing the whole drive, when ti's all on a tiny SSD micro card. Those things are so easy to misplace.

Re:Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

- We need to buy more hard drives to copy the rest of the data.
- Ahh... What da heck.. It is just old crap that people don't remember anymore... Delete it.

Re:Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

(Too lazy to dig out my long-forgotten account information.)

Plenty of the 11/780 tape drives are still around. Many commercial services will migrate your data. Just google for "9-track tape data recovery" or something similar.

You might even find a school or hobbyist who will recover that data for you if you nicely ask and offer pizza and beer money to the student who does it. But I'd trust a professional over a student.

I still have a box full of 9-tracks in storage, but fortunately have my data on DAT as well.

Now, getting my data off a floppy written by Xenix on the Lisa in the 1980s is a whole 'nother issue...

Re: Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

It would have been better if the "scientists" had not been paid grant money to unearth and gather the artifacts. At some point in the future when the strata can be explored using non invasive telemetry they will curse at the archeogrubbers who messed up so many of the fields to collect their stipend for 'science'.

Re: Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

I stuck away the source code I wrote in assembler for a 4 bit Hitachi 75000-series processor on a 3-1/2" floppy diskette formatted with a minix filesystem. It sat there for about a decade, I finally retrieved it this past December.

Re:Nothing of value

[smoot123]

I got 2400 feet of half an inch spool recorded at a breath taking 6250 Bytes per inch by VAX 11-780...Wish I can read that code once again.

Some iron filings and a good magnifying glass ought to just about work.

(I wonder where that number, 6250, came from? I mean, why not an even 6000?)

Re:Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure if you dedicate a good portion of your life to make sure your personal data is secure, you will probably be better off then a cloud company, but that would require, a lot of money in infrastructure, climate controlled buildings, Server area, to support older media storage, RAID storage, that need to be managed and upgraded.

Or you could have your own cloud, your own servers. You don't need a 'company' [other than the hosting company] for that.

Re:Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget last year's fire in Brazil's National Museum. Out of roughly 20 million artifacts housed at the museum, so far they've recovered about 2000 that survived. That's .01%.

Very little of that collection was on display(*). The Museum will reopen with its capacity almost intact.

(*) Media has a habit of augmenting thingsd for effect.

Re:Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

* I have a few boxes of super 8 films
* I even have a box of VHS cassettes with stuff I care about.
In my business we used Wolverine 8MM and Super 8MM Hi-definition Movie Scanners.Efficient and can now capture at up to 1080/24p (which is higher resolution than film). So you can archive them frame-by-frame flicker free.
Go to B & H Photo, they sell them.

We also use Firewire-based JVC Tape decks which capture VHS/SVHS at 480i and use cleanup software, there really isn't an excuse to archive,not with what they have. Even the firewire tape decks are around $500 and they get past macrovision (meaning disney tapes can be copied since IEEE-1394 doesn't care about it), even comes off at 2x the quality of an analog deck to digital capture. We have HR-DV1SU and HR-DV2SU. Otherwise look for a local person (I run Nerds With Cameras, Inc.) but this stuff has existed for a while for archive.

Re:Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

Of all those things, I guess the box of photographs and the super 8 films have the best chance of surviving me and of interest to my future grand-children.

It might survive to pass on to them, but will they actually even care? Someone in my family made a DVD of our family. Seeing the parts from my childhood were interesting in an "oh yeah, I forgot about that" way. But anything before I was born? Meh! Everyone has life stories. Most aren't particularly interesting.

Re: Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on your point of view. Historians, for one, have reason to value museum pieces. "Those who fail to understand history are doomed to repeat it". Nothing insane about understanding history.

Re: Nothing of value

[Miamicanes]

At the moment, the best passive long-term storage medium we have is the original (high-to-low) standard for single-layer BD-R.

Note this is NOT the newer & cheaper "low-to-high" (LTH) standard that came out a few years later.

HTL starts out as a shiny substrate that gets melted & dulled by the laser. LTH uses organic dyes (like DVD+/-R) that fade over time, especially if exposed to light or heat.

Players capable of reading them might not be common cheap consumer items 25-100 years from now, but they absolutely WILL exist as items for libraries, universities, governments, etc (so they might not be CHEAP, but they'll definitely exist & be reasonably available).

Avoid multi-layer discs. Lower layers START OUT with (recoverable) errors, and only get worse over time.

The main advantage of HTL (non-LTH) BD-R is the fact that it decouples the reading apparatus & electronics from the media. If your only copy of something is on a 40 year old SATA hard drive that no longer works, you're going to spend an UNHOLY amount of money to recover the data... if it can be recovered AT ALL.

Flash storage is COMPLETELY unfit for long-term storage... it's like a leaky bucket. And newer flash is LESS long-term stable, because the margin for error in MLC flash is a fraction of what it was with SLC flash.

By all means, keep additional backups in the cloud or on hard drives... but if you have to gamble everything on a single media type, go with HTL (non-LTH) BD-R.

Also... use common, open, well-documented & non-proprietary formats. Think twice about using encryption & ask whether you'd be more traumatized by disclosure or permanent loss... and assume the lesser evil you choose WILL happen.

Assume anything that's DRM-protected is likely to be gone in the long-term... by obsolescence & obscurity, if not outright disappearance.

Re:Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

are you really that stupid, or are you just being obtuse?

Re:Nothing of value

[ctilsie242]

I treat the cloud as another media type, like tape, disks, optical, punch cards, etc. The cloud is effective and reliable at handling "oopses" like drive failures. However, an attacker can purge everything you have with a couple mouse clicks if they get access to your account. Having local media is still critical, as most cloud providers charge egress fees for restores.

Ideally, I like having a 3-2-1 backup system. Three copies, two on different media, one offsite. For critical data, 4-3-2 might be useful. For example, a PC backs itself up to a NAS [1] via Veeam or Time Machine, documents get backed up to CrashPlan, and every so often, all critical files get burned to DVD every month or quarter. Alternatively, documents can be sent via Arq to Wasabi or Backblaze B2 for long term storage.

This way, if Internet access is tough, I have local backups. If I get stung by ransomware, I have physically read-only copies, etc.

I wish optical, as a consumer level format, were still developed. Yes, one can buy a Sony ODSD77U optical drive that does 1.5 TB, but not many people have $6500 for that. This would allow people to easily back up locally. No, it isn't "edgy" like the cloud... but it is ransomware resistant, and tends to have a long archival life... and a remote attacker can't destroy all your DVDs with a single mouse click.

[1]: Ideally, the NAS should take snapshots or backups, and have the admin user separate from the user for the shares, so if it gets hit by ransomware, a restore of that share is quick.

Re: Nothing of value

[houghi]

I woukd love it if everything from me that is older than a year and us online would disapear i have thrown out all my cd's and dvd's. I have trown out most books. Each year I trow out sruff I did not used or looked at in the last year.

Last year I ckeared out my parents appartment after they dies. Exexpt what I could take on the plane, all was thrown out, including hundrees of pictures. Some I never had seen from my family and learn some history about my famiky I never knew.

I was able to live without them. I can do it again. Nothing of any real vallue for others (exept perhaps financial)

People think that we must rember everything always all the time. We don't. Forgetting is a good thing. We have been doing it for thoudands of years.

I know we forgot how the pyramids where build. We are now able to do so much more and better.

Re: Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

It is the understanding of history that is important, not having an old clay pot or armor suit. The artifacts are interesting and connect us to the pet, but they aren't the most important part.

Re: Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

I kind of agree. It might be nice to have one old photo of your grandparents, but beyond that who actually gives a fuck. It's like the digital equivalent of keeping piles of old newspapers, baby clothes and plastic bags.

Re:Nothing of value

[SuricouRaven]

6250 using GCR coding for syncronisation, which requires five bits on tape for every four bits of usable storage. 6250 bytes/inch, after removing the overhead imposed by GCR, comes to exactly 5000 bytes-per-inch of actual usable storage on the tape.

I suspect the manufacturer reported raw storage capacity rather than usable storage capacity in order to make their tape sound more impressive. I wouldn't be surprised it there was even an asterisk on the box. I'm reminded of how LTO tape media today is always labeled with the compressed capacity in huge numbers, with a little asterisk and a much smaller number - both numerically and in print size - stating how much data the tape actually holds.

Re:Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

It sucks, I was hospitalized at one point several times in the recent past, While there my step dad threw out all the RAID hard drives; which contained all the music projects for what I just lost on myspace. Although I don’t make music anymore, It is sad all of its gone - It was very well organized and well produced; at a time in my life where I was more creatively inclined. (And the backup I had, an UltraSCSI Promise Array, I left at an old IT Job I ghosted.) Rip Myspace.com/Cideathrophy

I was JUST thinking about my MySpace portfolio this past month in passing, I probably should have accessed it and saved my files when the thought occured to me; which was the first time I’ve though about MySpace in many years.

My digital footprint goes way back, and this was one of my only creative portfolios and it is gone now, Due to my lack of care; But as typical with Data Loss; the care is felt in a newfound way after the loss.

Re:Nothing of value

[smoot123]

6250 using GCR coding for syncronisation, which requires five bits on tape for every four bits of usable storage.

Thanks for the pointer. I found other articles talking about 9-track tapes and assumed the 9 bits (8 data, one parity) were laid out transverse to the tape (i.e. in a single stripe perpendicular to the tape's length). I'll have to look at how GCR works because now I'm curious.

I suspect the manufacturer reported raw storage capacity rather than usable storage capacity in order to make their tape sound more impressive.

It's not just tape vendors. I work in the storage industry and there are all sorts of shenanigans around reporting spinning disk capacity. The first one is the reporting base. Most software people talk about base-2 megabytes (2^20) while all disk vendors report base-10 megabyte (10^6) capacities. I seem to recall there was one weird unit which was a 1,024,000 "megabyte", but hopefully someone took that bastardization out and shot it.

It gets more fun. If you query a 1 TB disk for its capacity, the value isn't exactly 10^12 or 2^40 bytes. Depending on the process, there's a little slop one way or the other. So if you're building a RAID array, you have to make sure your reported capacity is N times the minimum reported capacity of all the member disks. It kind of ruins your day when you run out of sectors in 2 of the 9 disks in your RAID set. And to make it exciting, you need to fix the capacity of the RAID set knowing you might replace a failed disk with another than the reported capacity might go down a hair. So we had a heuristic to decide just how much of the disk to depend on, which we called "rightsizing".

A guy I worked with wrote a 50 page paper explaining why, when you looked at a shelf with 20 1 TB disks in it, your usable capacity report never had the string "20 TB" anywhere to be seen.

Re: Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

To wars and fires add "construction activity".

We recently lost the oldest known depiction of a human face in art. You'd think this would be an essential marker in the timeline of human cultural expression.

It was a glyph on a rock near Australia's westernmost point. A subcontractor to Woodside Petroleum built a road over it, or crushed it for road foundation (details are unclear).

This was in the same year as the Taliban blew up two Buddhas.

But we have petrochemicals and jobs.

yay.

There is no reason why we can't have those things and also have a deep and rich culture.

Re: Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

Do be aware (I'm sure you are) that putting quote marks around "certain words" to dismiss them is "trolling".

Re:Nothing of value

[currently_awake]

They don't keep backups of their data?! Daily incremental and monthly full backup at the least, for a business enviornment. And practice a full restore onto new hardware to verify everything works. They didn't make an extra backup of the data before a new server migration?! Why didn't they install their stuff onto the new hardware and test it offline before the switchover?

Re:Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

armor all your cd's and copy them.

armor-all will restore even the worst cd/dvd.

Re:Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just tape vendors. I work in the storage industry and there are all sorts of shenanigans around reporting spinning disk capacity. The first one is the reporting base. Most software people talk about base-2 megabytes (2^20) while all disk vendors report base-10 megabyte (10^6) capacities. I seem to recall there was one weird unit which was a 1,024,000 "megabyte", but hopefully someone took that bastardization out and shot it.

The power-of-2 convention makes sense for DRAM because of the way that an address is decoded into a specific row/column location within a grid of cells. Disks and tapes don't have this underlying structure. Also you can get away with calling 1024 bytes a "kilobyte" but the error percentage goes up each time you step up to a larger unit. By the time you're dealing with terabytes vs. tebibytes it's worth taking the time to use the labels and reporting bases correctly. It is not a ripoff if your "2TB" drive gives you 2,000,000,000,000 usable bytes.

I'd also note that network communication has always been power-of-10. Your 9600 baud dialup or 10baseT Ethernet was sending 9,600 or 10,000,000 bits per second rather than anything base-2.

Re:Nothing of value

[Khyber]

"I have more than a few boxes of cds, many of them so badly aged that I can't read them any more"

You can flat-lap the original backing off with 1200 grit diamond abrasive, and apply a new backing. The data layer in non-CD-R(W) discs is in the plastic, not the reflective layer.

Re:Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a roll of paper tape around here somewhere, unless the "cleaning spouse" got to it. It has a FORTRAN IV program on it to do a Man-Whitney U test from my college days running on a Xerox Sigma 7. I have the same program written for my TRS-80 model I on a cassette out in the garage. The cassette tape recorder is in another drawer. Both programs returned the same results on the same data set. I think I have the FORTRAN IV code pages hidden somewhere in my college papers. I used the mainframe program to fulfill my BA degree in Anthropology. Go figure.

Re:Nothing of value

[Confused]

Most digital media is already lost today to me.

In the year 2019 the modern desktop PC still has the ability to read (and in many cases, write) CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray, 3.5" floppies (USB floppy drive), and almost any format of USB mass storage device made in the last 20+ years. Apart from magnetic tape (which I've already identified the solution for that problem), I fail to see how "most" digital media is lost to you.

You are partially right, many popular formats still can be read. Although reading some of the more exotic formats can be harder. The main problem is proper storage of the magnetic or optical media. Time isn't very kind to floppy disks, tapes and cd-roms. Even when having a matching drive, many media weren't readable any more.

As to access to online stuff, the sites often disappear, you lose the account credentials, etc. That's as good as lost.

Get used to what exactly? Painful levels of procrastination?

You're exactly right. This data wasn't critical to me, but from time to time I had the urge to check back on them. When I found a box of old photographs when my grand-mother died, it was easy retrieve the data. Some pictures were faded and for some negatives a scanner helped, but I got many interesting insights into the early days of my grandparent's and parent's youths. Seems my grandmother was quite a naughty girl back in the days.

Same with her collection of letters and journals. It was a bit harder to read - she wrote in Kurrent the way she learned in school instead of the more common latin style of handwriting today,

Now what can my children or grandchildren do with what they find in my boxes when they clean out the house? Spend $500 on my early collection of porn and mp3? Find out that most content on VHS-cassettes became mostly snow-storms? This is what's being lost. Not the super-high-importance stuff, the common things.

You might be one of the very conscientious people who move all their stuff from server to server. I'm the more average procrastinator. You'll won't probably lose that much, although if your grandchildren don't happen to have the passwords to your properly secured storage, they won't be any wiser than mine with boxes of old stuff.

Re:Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

The mold is a thing on VHS tapes too and the OP mentioned having them, I would assume all magnetic media that can be exposed somehow.

Re:Nothing of value

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you be so careless as to lose data?

A 6TB HDD costs under $200. Any idea how much storage that is? Let's say you have a bunch of video, and you've encoded it at 2GB/hour - and that's VERY inefficient.

That's 128 days of video, 24 hours a day.

I've never lost data. I always have my newest system, and my older system. I have had a disk failure, which is why I always have 2 at all times.

In another 20 years people will be asking "why would you ever be putting your data on a cloud owned by a company? Why would you trust the 3rd party?" Because by then, storage will be just about free, and you'll all finally learn, you cannot trust a 3rd party. It won't be long before an micro SD card is 1 TB, and costs $20. Gee, that's only a month's worth of video, at 4K..

Re:Nothing of value

[SuricouRaven]

Short version on the tape coding thing: It's syncronisation. There's no clock channel, so the bitstream needs to be self-syncronising, and the clock circuit can only syncronise on a bit transition. So more than a few consecutive zeros or ones and it goes wrong. There are a lot of different means of solving this, all of which involve having a few more bits in the signal than there are in the data. In GCR, four bits of data become five bits on tape.

Unbelievable

[squiggleslash]

I mean that literally. It's impossible to believe there are literally no backups at all, still less that this was all lost as a result of a server migration (what is this, is it run on an old 166MHz Pentium in the closet? Did they take the 40Mb IDE hard drive out of one containing EVERYTHING ON MYSPACE and slot it into the brand new spiffy Intel Core i5 they bought from eBay?)

The real question is why does MySpace not want to restore the old data? To which the answer could be anything from "They want to reduce bandwidth and storage costs because they're broke" to "They found a shitload of stuff that could get them into trouble and have no time to sift through decades of data."

Re:Unbelievable

[The MAZZTer]

My guess is they had backups, but only on new material dating back three years. OR backups only included NEW material (so they only ever actually had a single backup copy of everything) and the process was broken and they never realized it. Three years ago they changed backup processes to one that worked and they still failed to recognize all their old backups were useless.

Re:Unbelievable

[bagofbeans]

Feels right. They don't want to pay to keep it available, so drop it. Perfectly within their rights to do so.

Re:Unbelievable

[postbigbang]

No one will fall on their sword over this one. Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace, and I'm sure its failure has been a thorn in the side of it management.

No one will lose their jobs. You're data's gone. Move on. That's the message. Here now, look over there while we build a new site to suck you in.

Re:Unbelievable

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the loss of nearly all data is does make one wonder what the “Data Protection Officer“ did all day (or why they still have a job, other than to be subjected to presumably angry emails).

Re:Unbelievable

[Anonymous Coward]

"They found a shitload of stuff that could get them into trouble and have no time to sift through decades of data."

Met with a lawyer who said "Ever heard of SESTA/FOSTA/PIPA/whatever?" He probably said, "sure let's do it. I charge $150/hr for low paid underlings to sift through it for you."

Re:Unbelievable

[thegarbz]

I mean that literally. It's impossible to believe there are literally no backups at all

It's impossible to believe that there's no backup of a site that has been bought and sold a number of times and has so little interest that people couldn't believe it was still operating in the first place?

Re:Unbelievable

[Anonymous Coward]

Note how newer uploads are fine.I think this is part of their efforts with GDPR.

Re:Unbelievable

[Anonymous Coward]

>It's impossible to believe there are literally no backups at all
What I could easily see is that they thought they were making backups, but never tested them for data integrity or even to see if the backups actually got copied to backup media.
Or the backups were clumsily encrypted with one public key and the private key was lost years ago -- and nobody noticed.

Re:Unbelievable

[smoot123]

I mean that literally. It's impossible to believe there are literally no backups at all, still less that this was all lost as a result of a server migration

I'm puzzled too. First, who performs a server upgrade without a backout plan? And I've got to believe the file storage and the servers accessing the storage were different things. What happened, did they upgrade a server and it executed "rm -rf" followed by writing zeros to all the disks? If nothing else, re-writing all the disks would take time.

My best theory is the pre-2016 files were stored on servers using a really hokey MySpace file system which was banged together over a weekend in 1998, when MySpace was rocketing to prominence. But if that was the case, I'd deploy new servers first, then do a data migration. Anyway, something doesn't sound right.

Re:Unbelievable

[squiggleslash]

The company has been bought multiple times, not the site. You make it sound when it was sold to Murdoch they just stuck the server in a box, printed of a label using eBay's USPS shipping label service, and said "Bye!"

The company has probably seen a fair amount of staff turnover, but I doubt something as core as "who maintains the servers" has not had reasonable continuity since shortly after MySpace became a thing.

Re:Unbelievable

[Chris Mattern]

I doubt something as core as "who maintains the servers" has not had reasonable continuity since shortly after MySpace became a thing.

Your faith in upper management is truly touching.

Re:Unbelievable

[istartedi]

Yes, until yesterday all these files were available to be served, right? If they were being incrementally overwritten you'd think somebody would have complained... at least before it was *all* over-written, one of a few dozen people would notice, right?

There are programs out there that intentionally wipe drives because rm simply unlinks files, it doesn't erase bits. Unless the drives were over-written then the data is there. OK, maybe some stuff would get written over after being un-linked, but not all the old data, right?

At least some of that data, probably a significant percentage, is probably nice and clean on drive sectors. A decent recovery program could salvage a lot, but these aren't F-99 spy satellite plans, they're gaudy web sites and mediocre bands.

Many files are most likely not lost, they're just not economically recoverable.

Re:Unbelievable

[thegarbz]

but I doubt something as core as "who maintains the servers" has not had reasonable continuity

Continuity is no where near as important as turnover. A lot is lost in any change in staff. You're foolish to think changing company and or staff doesn't have a huge impact on your backup strategy / capability.

Also do you have evidence that Murdoch didn't just stick it in a box and said bye? I mean according to TFS they just lost a shitton of stuff, which is quite at odds with the pedestal on which you have elevated them.

Re:Unbelievable

[Tablizer]

It is baffling. It seems that much stuff would require several servers and/or harddrives, and they are not going to all croak at the same time. Thus, a 10% loss seems within realm, but not 100%. That requires a Gold Plated Multi-Layered Fsckup.

Maybe some wayward task script over-wrote them all (inadvertent "worm"), and the compression algorithm that wrote the backups had a big bug that nobody ever noticed until it was too late because they never tested the backups.

Either way, I suspect this is a case of cost-cutting biting them in the giblets.

Re:Unbelievable

[DigiShaman]

Truth be told, your media content should be backed up on your end. If it's text, back it up to TXT or DOC file. Whatever. Don't rely on free web services to retain your data for you.

You get exactly what you pay for. You pay nothing, you should expect nothing. Them the cold facts of life!

Re:Unbelievable

[postbigbang]

There's an aggregate amount of blood sweat and tears now evaporated into the ether because someone either deliberately or accidentally didn't do their job. Either way, it's a middle finger flipped at users.

This falls into the YouHadOneJob categroy, no matter what or how you value the assets lost.

Re:Unbelievable

[squiggleslash]

No, I'm not the one with faith in management here. I'm the one saying they're bullshitting about what happened. You guys are the ones saying "Yeah, sounds legit".

The probability that a server upgrade has resulted in them losing everything before a certain date is pretty much zero.

Re:Unbelievable

[guruevi]

This is the cloud, we don't need no backups, we just replicate your primary storage. This is quite literally what Microsoft does with Office365 as well as Box.com, Dropbox and others; they have no backup plans, just storage that could be blown away with a click of the button from a developer.

Re:Unbelievable

[Anonymous Coward]

No one will fall on their sword over this one. Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace, and I'm sure its failure has been a thorn in the side of it management.

No one will lose their jobs. You're data's gone. Move on. That's the message. Here now, look over there while we build a new site to suck you in.

Rupert/NEWS dumped it years back for like 35mil

Re:Unbelievable

[Anonymous Coward]

Now they do'nt have to worry about impending EU legislation which means only licensed stuff can be on the internet.

Google for Article 13 and don't forget A.12. The EU ishanding the internet over to Alphabet while disowning creators.

Re:Unbelievable

[DigiShaman]

Personally (and as others have stated before me), I believe the data loss to be intentional; to reduce liability for illicit copyright infringing content as well as reduce cost in infrastructure support.

As for the loss of all that human progress: well, it's often said that the best lessons learned are from the mistakes we've made. So, not a total loss; and there's still plenty of time to (re)create.

Laugh now, cry later. The Internet is evolving.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Internet of the 1990's and early 2000's is dying. There are a large number of sites I enjoyed that have died. Some get resurrected (like Nekochan and Nectarine radio - two casualties that recently came back). However, for the most part many sites die when their former hordes of users quit providing clicks to pay the bills. I have to remind myself how ephemeral the content was in the first place. It was only going to last as long as the clicks made it profitable. That is definitely not the mentality that started the 'net. Having seen HTTP birthed right after GOPHER, Verionica, FTP, Archie, and other now archaic services I felt like hypertext was really going to set the world on fire in a good way. The interconnections made the system stronger and they didn't seem as impermanent. Now it feels like everything is just a sandbar, shifting in time. I am not going to miss anything specific from MySpace except a few band pages I saw there for the first time and haven't visited for years. However, knowing that any cultural landmark on the Internet is destined for "rm -rf" makes life seem that much more transient as well.

Re:Laugh now, cry later. The Internet is evolving.

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently retired from a 30 year career as a programmer and database designer. I worked on projects from telephony inventory tracking and provisioning, telephone call routing, educational government-required reporting system, and pension line-of-business management. Along with a lot of smaller contract stuff too numerous to mention.

All of it is gone. Either the companies for whom it was custom made are no longer in existence, or the systems have been replaced by newer systems. The very last things I worked on before retirement were to prop up the legacy system while the replacement system was being installed and tested. I'm pretty sure that not a single line of code or database I designed is currently working, anywhere, at all.

My entire career might as well never have existed, as far as any trace of it to be found.

Computers are the very definition of ephemeral.

Re:Laugh now, cry later. The Internet is evolving.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is how it has usually worked, no? But it is a shock to realize that it is happening to things we personally worked on. Built from scratch sometimes.

How many newspapers from the 20th century were started and it is now as if they never existed? How many books? How many movies, etc. Those are the 'new' 19th/20th technologies that are either gone or fading. I gues I can't speak much to what happened before that. Nothing is coming to mind.

Most of what humans do is ephemeral. Of all the billions of people who have ever lived, how many can any of us name? How much of their lives do we actually know about? The book of Ecclesiastes comes to mind.It ends optimistically, if you believe it.

Re:Laugh now, cry later. The Internet is evolving.

[110010001000]

My entire career might as well never have existed, as far as any trace of it to be found.

Computers are the very definition of ephemeral.

 
I wouldn't think like that. For those 30 years you provided a valuable service. So what if it isn't used anymore? You produced something that helped a lot of people in those 30 years. Also, your work might have inspired the creators of the replacement project.

Re:Laugh now, cry later. The Internet is evolving.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah and interesting statement, but I feel like something needs to be said. It's not like your career was worthless, it obviously helped people and got things from point A to point B.

A lot of jobs are like this. What if I worked at a restaurant for years. Where did all those sandwiches go? Well people ate them, and they are alive because of those sandwiches.

Re:Laugh now, cry later. The Internet is evolving.

[Rob Cebollero]

Back in the BBS days, the non-academic online world largely rested on the shoulders of dedicated sysops who ran their portals as labors of love. Some became comfortable enough with regulars that you'd know about the broad strokes of their personal lives because they'd tell you. This month the board is short of funds because their wife had a car accident, or they are moving to a different state so the local dialup line will be changing, etc. Even as casual user you had a sense of who your host was, if only to the extent that they manifested in your mind as a distinct person behind the handle, as someone with a 'real' life that afforded limited time for trade wars and limited patience for flame wars. Most of all, you knew that if they could no longer sustain the board, it would likely close down. If it was well established it might get transferred to a new sysop, but this would be a palpable transition.

I think, for me (as someone who didn't yet have an academic account) at least, the notion of a 'place' on the internet began to lose its implied direct correlation with a specific place-custodian (admin, sysop, etc.) with the rise of USENET - or perhaps more accurately the gradual expansion of USENET into privately hosted nodes. Now, any BBS you sign on to could have a USENET section and this started to become the primary reason you went online. Soon it didn't matter what you used to dial in, USENET was always there. USENET was my first experience of an 'always on' virtual place that existed outside of both time and geography. And as such, it *seemed* to be less constrained by limiting human factors like sleep, money, and motivation. I notice now, looking back on this time, that it was here that I began to forget that this apparent permanence was an illusion that depended on a precarious tangle of enthusiast volunteers. Over time this impression ossified into an uncritical (and largely undetected) background premise which regarded the 'internet' as a self-sustaining phenomenon that was greater the sum of the humanity from which it projected. In support of this I found an ample supply of propaganda from the likes of large format Wired, the cluetrain manifesto and the accompanying inkblot constellation of vapid mic drop zingers. "The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." SMH at my younger self. I couldn't get enough of that "overthrow the empire" futurism-kink, which I now recognize as blatantly self-dealing charlatanry peddled, for the most part, by opportunistic cynics whose primary motivation for 'disintermediation' and disrupting old power hierarchies was merely to position themselves atop new ones. Their patronizing and predatory view of 'the masses' differed little from those they sought to replace.

Today's most conspicuous version of this phenomenon appears in the form of blockchainism (a fringe political agenda framed as a neutral technology), which likewise rests on the inarticulate assumption that the net (and by extension, properties on the net - myspace, facebook, The Cloud, etc) somehow exists independently of infrastructure, geography, and (most importantly) people.

No doubt at this very moment someone is readying a VC pitch using the OP event as evidence that if MySpace were rebuilt on the clou^H^H^H^H Blockchain, the prospect of losing all this property would have been rendered impossible (ahem, 'probabilistically impossible') thanks to the alchemy of 'immutability.' As if, with enough electrons burned, it becomes possible to grant data - a description of matter - the same quality of self-evident permanence as matter itself. The old dream repackaged under a new name.

Re:Laugh now, cry later. The Internet is evolving.

[kriston]

Don't forget FidoNet.

Re:Laugh now, cry later. The Internet is evolving.

[Anonymous Coward]

that's like saying a chef might not have existed because all the food he made got turned into dookie. that's obviously not a valid way to look at it.

Re:Laugh now, cry later. The Internet is evolving.

[UnderCoverPenguin]

Back in the BBS days, the non-academic online world largely rested on the shoulders of dedicated sysops who ran their portals as labors of love. ... Most of all, you knew that if they could no longer sustain the board, it would likely close down.

A former co-worker of mine (old then me) used to run a BBS. In it's hay-day, it was a member of UUNET, ProNet and FidoNet, including functioning as a gateway between those 3 networks. He started it when his employer replaced their AT&T 3B2-300 with an AT&T 3B2-400. Not wanting to keep the machine, they let him take the 3B2-300. Later, he got the 3B2-400 when they replaced that with a 3B5. He networked the 2 together for load sharing. At time, he had 8 phone lines with 8 modems for his BBS. Since the machines ran Unix, he had to write his own BBS software. He also wrote implementations of the ProNet and FidoNet node-to-node protocols, as well as message conversion libraries.

Usage of the BBS peaked in about 1992. In 1995, he dropped down to 6 modems, dropping more over time. When he finally shut it down in 2000, it was down to just 1 modem and 2 regular users. In 1993, and several later times, he considered taking the BBS live on the Internet, but the cost was prohibitive. He did, once, have it set up at a "retro computing" exhibit run by a local science fiction convention. He hasn't powered up the hardware since then, though he still has it all.

Re:Laugh now, cry later. The Internet is evolving.

[guruevi]

Trust me, somewhere some of your 30 year old code is still running, fully compiled and undocumented and I have to come clean it up.

Re:Laugh now, cry later. The Internet is evolving.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Internet of the 1990's and early 2000's is dying. There are a large number of sites I enjoyed that have died.

Present company excepted?

Re:Laugh now, cry later. The Internet is evolving.

[Anonymous Coward]

My entire career might as well never have existed, as far as any trace of it to be found.

Computers are the very definition of ephemeral.

So is life.

Re:Laugh now, cry later. The Internet is evolving.

[DarthVain]

Other than very few examples, LIFE is the very definition of ephemeral.

Sure there are some things that "stand the test of time", but for 99.9999999999999999999% of us it doesn't. Procreation is about it, and even then there are no certainties.

As someone else posted, the most you can hope for really is that in part you make some small positive difference during your time that has advanced whatever it is incrementally for the next guy. Standing on the shoulders of giants etc...

It might be humbling in retrospect, but hey, that's life... :)

Re:Laugh now, cry later. The Internet is evolving.

[Anonymous Coward]

>My entire career might as well never have existed, as far as any trace of it to be found.

That is such a lame nihilistic perspective. At the point in time for which you code was running, it resulted in your payment and prosperity, keeping food on your table to keep you alive, sustain your financial well-being, and keep you in the workforce as a functional member of society. Your code, whatever it did or was, probably was in the critical path for some broader system or process, such that if it did not exist, those processes would have failed and those companies running it would have ground to a halt. So for the lifetime of your code, companies operated, people got paid, yourself included, and all the players in the system continued to live on. As new systems were introduced, the designers of those systems will be bringing to the table lessons learned from prior systems.

So although perhaps not a single instruction run today is traced back to an exact line of code you authored, know that millions upon millions of daily individual decision, actions, and results have spider-webbed out to whatever swath of people you interacted with in you and your positions/groups sphere of influence.

I liken it to a neural network. The training set could be deleted, lost to the sands of time, but for the time that it was used, it influenced the network and is forever imprinted on it.

Phew

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean lets face it, this is not a bad thing. Some of us were idiots way back then

So they just committed hara kiri

[Chas]

They just ended their business then.
Because nobody'll ever trust their platform again.
And they just lost terabytes or exabytes of content.

How much did you pay to store them?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

You are not a customer of MySpace. You are the product. You paid nothing to store your tracks in the cloud. They did it, hoping they can sell your eyeball time.

It is not valuable anymore to MySpace. So they deleted the data you up loaded.

If those tracks are valuable to you, you would taken proper backups or paid someone to store it properly.

You paid them nothing. They owe you nothing.

Re:How much did you pay to store them?

[thegarbz]

Errr this is MySpace. No one "stored" anything on there. Don't talk about it like a cloud provider. Literally nothing of value was lost, it's just no longer being shared with both of the remaining MySpace customers.

Re:How much did you pay to store them?

[karlandtanya]

You gave them something of value (your data, and the opportunity to grab your eyeballs).
And they gave you the expectation that they would store your data for you.

The term you should be looking at is not "payment" but "consideration".

I'm sure some lawyer somewhere is trying to figure out how to file a class action suit.

Re:How much did you pay to store them?

[Ksevio]

You are not a customer of MySpace. You are the product. You paid nothing to store your tracks in the cloud. They did it, hoping they can sell your eyeball time. It is not valuable anymore to MySpace. So they deleted the data you up loaded.

Guess you're really not up on how Internet services work. Usually they have a couple classes of customers - advertisers that pay them with money in exchange for them serving ads and the users who pay them with screen-space/information in exchange for using the service. If the service doesn't attract enough users, they fail. That means that they have to keep them happy just like any other customer, so all those images and videos they lost might not seem valuable on the face, but if their user customers see their data is gone and stop using the site, then their advertiser customers see the audience shrink and stop buying ads.

Think of them like a broker so you visit the site and they connect you with an advertiser. Essentially, you're paying myspace through the advertiser

Re:How much did you pay to store them?

[SlaveToTheGrind]

You gave them something of value (your data, and the opportunity to grab your eyeballs).
And they gave you the expectation that they would store your data for you.

The term you should be looking at is not "payment" but "consideration".

Putting aside whether the examples you give would actually be deemed adequate consideration, the term you should be looking for is "freedom of contract." The MySpace terms and conditions are crystal clear that (1) their liability is limited to the amount actually paid , and (2) specifically disavow any additional liability for "destruction of the MySpace services":

NOTWITHSTANDING ANYTHING TO THE CONTRARY CONTAINED HEREIN, MYSPACE’S LIABILITY TO YOU FOR ANY CAUSE WHATSOEVER AND REGARDLESS OF THE FORM OF THE ACTION, WILL AT ALL TIMES BE LIMITED TO THE AMOUNT PAID, IF ANY, BY YOU TO MYSPACE FOR THE MYSPACE SERVICES DURING THE TERM OF MEMBERSHIP. THE FOREGOING LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY WILL APPLY EVEN IF ANY OF THE FOREGOING EVENTS OR CIRCUMSTANCES WERE FORESEEABLE AND EVEN IF MYSPACE WAS ADVISED OF OR SHOULD HAVE KNOWN OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH LOSSES OR DAMAGES, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER YOU BRING AN ACTION BASED IN CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING WHETHER CAUSED, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, BY NEGLIGENCE, ACTS OF GOD, TELECOMMUNICATIONS FAILURE, OR DESTRUCTION OF THE MYSPACE SERVICES).

I'm sure some lawyer somewhere is trying to figure out how to file a class action suit.

Probably not any of them that have a passing understanding of contract law. No reasonable person reading the MySpace T&Cs could come away with the notion that MySpace was taking on the legal obligation to perpetually backup and insure a user's data.

Re:How much did you pay to store them?

[Matheus]

The article implied that there were songs that only existed on MySpace and are therefore "lost". I find this to be *extremely unlikely.. I mean this sentence being uttered would be straight up laughable "I uploaded my new song to MySpace and so deleted every other copy I had of the song including the masters" BUT either way that's what OP is referring to.. Any artist who decided relying on MySpace as the one and only repository of their art was a good idea deserves to lose it.

What at least once had value if it still may have would be the likes/followers/listens those songs had piled up over time. I haven't seen anyone in the industry giving a rats ass about your MySpace specs for a while but that doesn't mean it isn't still a thing somewhere.. I would similarly say if your *only popularity data is on MySpace and haven't branched into *any of the more currently relevant platforms in recent years that is still Your bad for not doing your due diligence to get your music out there but at least that had more implied value/commitment than using the site as master sound file storage.

Re:How much did you pay to store them?

[mx b]

You are not a customer of MySpace. You are the product.

...

You paid them nothing. They owe you nothing.

Little bit of a contradiction here. If I am the product, then I paid with my private information and attention (for ads). Just because government currency didn't directly exchange hands doesn't mean I didn't pay anything, or that they aren't providing me some kind of service for that barter. Stop giving corporations excuses to get away with whatever they want.

By all means

[guygo]

But don't let this put you off keeping all your data on the cloud. Who needs local files, amIright? Local files are so hard to manage... so put 'em on the cloud so the next time some underpaid operator forgets a command-line switch you can lose it all.

Re:By all means

[doconnor]

Local files got lost at a higher rate then then cloud. The difference is when you lose your local files, it doesn't make Slashdot.

Re:By all means

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is when you lose your local files, you still have the floppy disks/CDs from 12 years ago.

(I definitely did not mention those DECtapes in the attic).

Re:By all means

[PPH]

Hah! I backed up all my stuff on Megaupload.

Re:By all means

[chrism238]

... so put 'em on the cloud...

Put them in two clouds.

Re:By all means

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair - Mysql's "delete from table" should always auto-default to WHERE - and should only delete all when you type delete from table WHERE ALL".

When engineers design stuff =/

Re:By all means

[doom]

Yup. A few years back, a friend of mine lost a hell of a lot of original photos because he thought flickr was a good place to keep them.

On the other hand, over roughly the same time period, I've lost about a dozen photos in a silly disk management mistake.

As other people have noted though, stashing things in two places, local and remote, is likely to be even better. The next question though is "the cloud" better than, say, "an ftp site".

Re:By all means

[thegarbz]

But don't let this put you off keeping all your data on the cloud.

I won't. I mean MySpace has as much to do with the cloud as it does my local supermarket, and I'm not put off going down there to buy a bottle of coke either.

Seriously are you guys young and don't remember that absolutely nothing about MySpace involved them "storing" things on your behalf? From what I recall there wasn't even a way of downloading things you uploaded on the platform.

Re:By all means

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure you have the floppy disks BUT do you have the floppy drive that will read your disks. What do you mean track alignment is off?

Re:By all means

[Pascoea]

The difference is when you lose your local files, you still have the floppy disks/CDs from 12 years ago.

(I definitely did not mention those DECtapes in the attic).

Sure, but are they readable? Are you absolutely sure they readable? I mean, you wouldn't know unless you read each and every one of them periodically.

Re:By all means

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Cloud" for redundancy is likely better than a simple FTP site, for one simple reason. The cloud typically results in that data being immediately accessible. Meaning it often ends up being the live copy of the data, while the local copy ends up being the backup.

Most Apps and Services are not very friendly to FTP integration on the backend, so you end up having to store the files locally to migrate them to the cloud, resulting in having to manage three copies of the data. FTP, local cache, and "the cloud".

Re:By all means

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is when you lose your local files, you still have the floppy disks/CDs from 12 years ago.
(I definitely did not mention those DECtapes in the attic).

Sure, but are they readable? Are you absolutely sure they readable? I mean, you wouldn't know unless you read each and every one of them periodically.

What's funny is that some of us can accurately answer that question.

I still maintain a number of working Apple//e systems and data, mainly out of a misguided but determined desire to preserve part of my childhood.
2/3rds of my 5.25" floppy collection, around 400 disks from the mid 80's, mostly all succumbed to data loss in 2009 while in storage in my attic, likely in the fall/winter period.

I know this as a year and a half prior was the final media migration to image files, where the checksums matched those in .shk files of their contents on scsi drives.
The spring of 2009 was when my first BBS would no longer boot off the original floppy media it ran on in production, prompting to check a number of other disks at random over a number of floppy drives, at least one of which passed all hardware diagnostics and alignment checks.

This isn't to say any data was lost, as it has all been through many media refreshes and migrations over the years, with an "authoritative" archive of image files on both my active file server and numerous backup drives in a couple different locations. Thankfully each floppy/side only held 140kb so it's not as if image files take up a noticeable amount of storage by today's standards.

I can also say semi-accurately my 8" floppy collection became inaccessible to me some time between 1999 and 2001, when my only 8" drive had a capacitor leak and corrode the PCB traces between those times. Before exploring options to repair it, I found my system would no longer recognize or talk to the zvx4 card for that drive.
It seems they used EPROM chips for their ROM yet neglected to cover the transparent UV window on the top used to erase the chips. I've never been able to find replacement firmware.

When it comes to our current cloud storage, while certainly it is great as one additional location for backups in addition to the others, using it as your only storage is about as dangerous as using any other single form of storage as your only storage.
Since most cloud providers will explicitly reject any responsibility from the outcome of their actions, I would much prefer to at least keep that on my own shoulders so to speak, so I know my local copies are handled with exactly the level of care I want them to be.

Re:By all means

[Waccoon]

It would help if modern OSes did their job. They have all the fancy graphics APIs for games and entertainment, but how many of them have built-in backup software (not attached to a cloud), and how many users even know what those options are? Even in the Linux world, people still refer you to rsync, even though it is a mirroring utility, not a backup utility.

Nobody does backups because it's just not important to the bean counters. Remember when the standard practice to fix any laptop was to do a factory reset?

Re:By all means

[Anonymous Coward]

... so put 'em on the cloud...

Put them in two clouds.

And put those two clouds in a third for even better redundancy.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/908/

Re: By all means

[doconnor]

MacOS does have a backup system that supports local, network and iClould backups.

My Hope

[yourpusher]

foiled!

I didn't know they had one server

[jader3rd]

So was all that old stuff hosted on one server?

Re:I didn't know they had one server

[Anonymous Coward]

How many users do you think they have in 2019? they could host on a Raspberry PI.

MyHope

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone should probably reach out to Molly Lewis for comment:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=avxpn_MsPYs

Lots of free space at MySpace

[Alain Williams]

Well, if you weren't paying for the storage then you have no right to complain. Keep your own backups!

I sometimes wish that this sort of thing happened more often and that home PCs failed more often - then people might take the idea of backups seriously. But all that good reliability does is to lull people into a false sense of security so that, when something does go wrong, their loss is even greater, unfortunately.

Ask the NSA

[nicc7778398]

I believe they will have a free backup copy

Hanlon's Razor

[Anonymous Coward]

  "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

...how much they want for the bridge?

Surely they're selling a bridge with all that BS?

By all means:storing torrents.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what Piratebay storage is for.

Re:By all means:storing torrents.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Pirate Bay never stored any files...

The First Purge

[Anonymous Coward]

America. 2019. Internet idling is at 1%. Crime against eardrums is at an all-time low. Violence against good taste barely exists. With on exception...

Nothing of Value, But...

[Anonymous Coward]

How the actual fuck could they lose everything? Why do the not have any backups?

What the actual fuck?

Re:Nothing of Value, But...

[freeze128]

Data lost due to corruption. Backups of corrupted data contain corrupted data.

Public Cloud is Safe and Secure

[Anonymous Coward]

Keeping important stuff on your own private computer is risky. Real news says so. Bwahahaha

Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

The blinky tags! They're gone! Won't someone think of the blinky tags?

Internet archive?

[SuperKendall]

It seems that something like the Internet Archive must have captured a lot of this, that at least someone could restore from - something like this.

Re:Internet archive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me or does anyone else think the internet archive icon looks like a trash can? The power of suggestion...

Captcha: accuracy

How is stuff lost in a migration

[DarkOx]

Even if you don't have backup how does one generally lose stuff in migrations. I am always amazed when i read that. Because if you are not upgrading in place (which I would term a software migration not a server migration) usually the process isn't destructive. Why can't they just stand the old server back up?

Only think I can think of is move the data volume from the old server to the new server via the san and corrupt the file system in the process or something. Still seems really odd.

More like something did not go smoothly and we are not going to invest the effort into recovering the data because nobody really cares.

Re:How is stuff lost in a migration

[Anonymous Coward]

It may be that after the server migration completed, nobody tested to verify that the really old data was still intact. The current data, which is used the most, was tested heavily. The old server is decommissioned and removed. Regular backups of the new server begin. The old backups begin to overwrite the older backups. Later, someone notices that the really old data was missing/corrupt. It is not too late to recover data from the old server (which is gone) and too late to recover from backups (which are overwritten).

"Cloud" is not plan "A"

[perpenso]

Although all the companies talk a good game about how safe their storage is, in reality archiving your old stuff is really hard

A past employer contracted out to a reputable off-site backup service company, circa late 1990s. Anything over one year old was moved off-site freeing up local server storage. In addition the off-site was supposed to have tape backup. When requesting something from the off-site there was about a 25% chance you would not get it, about a quarter of the time you were told it was missing or damaged and unrecoverable.

Personally I am grateful for the previous lesson regarding "cloud" storage. I have local backups for the important stuff. "Cloud" is for convenience, and a plan "C" incase your building burns down. Its not plan "A".

Re:"Cloud" is not plan "A"

[Bruinwar]

My current employers IT can't recover files most of the time & the back-ups are on site. I get the feeling they don't actually try.

Re: "Cloud" is not plan "A"

[Anonymous Coward]

Backups are stupidly easy to do, if you aren't stupid about how to do them. Whenever someone told me that "somebody" overwrote the the file they needed, I'd ask what the date of the version they wanted was, and then drop any variations of the file from around then into their network folder for them to pick through. Took about five minutes per request, 90% of that asking for "what file, when, and playing detective when they answer ambiguously 'it was an Excel, with (client name) or similar in the name' type stuff.

Re: "Cloud" is not plan "A"

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two kinds of backups:
Archive - long term storage to create -------- archives. You only go back to meet specific requirements - mostly held off site and a definite PITA to get back.
Disaster Recovery - master copy with a series of incremental updates to recover from a crash/theft/fire etc.

At my last place of employment, I was in charge of the day to day management of the Disaster Recovery process (Just a little under 5 petabytes) supporting over 100,000 PC's across the US and a small set of data in Moscow (Russia). I had one guy call and say he needed his data that was saved on our system, but it was over a year ago and he had deleted the information from his PC. He did not grasp the idea that the backup software would keep data for 90 days after it was deleted. After 90 days the system would "purge" the old data. I had a heated argument with him about the differences in disaster recover versus archive.

I find it interesting that the people running the POS in this article did not understand the difference between disaster recovery and archive. Or that they apparently did not have any backups at all. I have done many server "refreshes" and while it can be complex, you need to plan it detail and you need a back out plan.

So the real news is that Myspace still existed?

[camazotz]

I'm not sure that it's the fact that Myspace is still out there or that people were still using them for storage that is more shocking.

Re:So the real news is that Myspace still existed?

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 (if I had any points to give (even if I log in, I don't)).

The only good backup is one that's on physical media that you can put your hands on and read with your current system(s). I include both criteria, because of too many occasions where tapes turned out to be write-only backups.

Why anybody would consider rented (explicitly because you pay for it, or implicitly because of your presence in their system) online storage in somebody else's system to be a backup is beyond me. It's a cache for transfer of material between multiple systems or users. It's not a backup, because it can vanish with no notice either by screwups like this one or by just forgetting to pay the bill some month.

Super simple

[DogDude]

Actually, I think that keeping backups are super simple. Copy everything onto a hard drive. Copy that hard drive onto a few others. Check it every so often. Move it to newer hard drives as the old ones fail or the hard drives can't be read easily by modern computers. I've successfully kept all of my personal stuff for about 30 years now, and haven't lost anything.

Re:Super simple

[saider]

Don't even wait for failure. Every year I buy a hard drive, and I replace either the backup, or the backup's backup. I also have a pair of USB Flash drives I use for critical info - family pictures, financial and legal data, etc. I just copy select folders from the backup drives to the flash drives.

Re:Super simple

[Anonymous Coward]

For a few generations anyway, especially for common and prevalent formats of data like .txt, .zip, and .jpg. Advance to more complex formats, like .DOC, or .DAT, etc., and you eventually run into issues bringing the data into the modern era. Even .PDF, and .MP3 will eventually suffer such a fate.

With Microsoft pushing a 6 month accelerated upgrade cycle, and Software as a Service, this becomes true now more than ever.

Re:Super simple

[DogDude]

Good point. That's a much better idea. It's not like hard drives are expensive any more.

Re:Super simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I think that keeping backups are super simple. Copy everything onto a hard drive. Copy that hard drive onto a few others. Check it every so often. Move it to newer hard drives as the old ones fail or the hard drives can't be read easily by modern computers. I've successfully kept all of my personal stuff for about 30 years now, and haven't lost anything.

Great! Now can you do the same on a 100 terrabyte install base of databses, differing raid systems, different file systems, a SAN or two- have you even managed a SAN? Then there's the software, OS, and configurations needed to access and make sense of all that data. Having a raw file New_Newest_October.mp3 doesn't help determine the owner, where it goes, who should not access it, how old it is.

And then there's the security concerns. Naturally old forgotten data has old forgotten encryption keys which naturally are expired every time you try to decrypt that financial planning document for the janitorial staff from 2011 the new CFO asked for.

Backups are easy at home with minimal security and its only raw data.

Re: Super simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you are responsible for managing a hundred terabytes?!!??! That is like, almost $2000 worth of drives! And a server class box that handles that, with dual integrated ten gigabit nics, and enough memory to run it, is almost another two grand! My god, that's almost the same price as the leasing fees of a mid range sedan for a year!
However do you deal with the stress of that awe inspiring responsibility?

If you think that is scary, you don't know how to do backups. Backup costs are entirely driven by the differential size in daily data. So you buy enough storage to back everything up once and then deal with the daily slice. If you aren't using data deduplication on your file system level, you are doing it wrong.

Oh, and the the coward that will claim he needs a hundred terabytes of new data per day... That still only two grand a day for drives and another five hundred for a decent not great, tech to run it. You are like a indy car owner bitching about the price of the gas when you need to go 500 miles at 5mpg. If you can't afford $200 for gas you sure as hell can't afford the car.

Re:Super simple

[StormReaver]

Even .PDF, and .MP3 will eventually suffer such a fate.

With Microsoft...

I think I found the problem.

Re: Super simple

[reboot246]

He's just bragging about his porn collection.

Re:Super simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Bull Shit.
Backups in the enterprise are not simple "copies".
Idiot.

Re: Super simple

[Anonymous Coward]

100 Terabites - Shit
The servers I managed had just under 5 Petabytes of storage. Your pussy little systems suck. Most large enterprises would laugh at your 'piddlie little' backup solution.
Jesus - grow a pair, get a job, get a little experience.

Re:Super simple

[Anonymous Coward]

PDF/A and MP3 are open formats and there's a lot of stuff encoded in them. I don't think they'll become unreadable in our lifetime. Of course if you use proprietary file formats the joke's on you. Some proprietary formats have been cracked open (remember divx?) but it takes a lot of effort.

Piracy as backup

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of things (like old Doctor Who episodes and the first Superbowl broadcast) that only exist today because unauthorized copies were made. The continued extension of copyright terms and DRM measures make the loss of large numbers of cultural artifacts not just possible but inevitable.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

One word..

[fluffernutter]

rsync

We just lost ...

[PPH]

.. some good revenge porn.

I suspect that the wealthy husband of a lady I know slipped someone a few bucks to mistype a command line.

My Bad

[Waffle Iron]

I found the bug in my migration script. That damned byzantine "sh" language syntax strikes again:

SOURCE_FILES = "/mnt/the_only_copy_of_myspace"
 
BACKUP_TARGET = "/dev/tape0"
 
if [ "$1"='-dry-run' ]; then
    BACKUP_TARGET="/dev/null"
fi
 
tar cf BACKUP_TARGET SOURCE_FILES
 
if [ "$1"!='-dry-run' ]; then
    rm -rf SOURCE_FILES
fi

Looks like I forgot the spaces around "=". Oh well, live and learn.

Re:My Bad

[thegarbz]

Can someone explain this for those of us who don't live and breath bash?

Re:My Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone explain this for those of us who don't live and breath bash?

Sure, quick explanation: When using the [ test with conditionals, it's extremely important to put spaces between the parameters of the conditionals. In most programming languages, it's not really a big deal, but in bash (and other shells) it's critical.

This is very wrong:

if [ "$1"='-dry-run' ]; then

This is more correct:

if [ "$1" = '-dry-run' ]; then

I've been burned once or twice by that before. The stakes weren't so high, but it was one of those days where I could stare at that line for an hour and not see the problem.

The way the OP wrote the script, the "conditionals" would always evaluate to true. So, the script would dump the contents of a backup out to /dev/null (i.e., "backup" never happens), and then the original files would be razed to the ground with rm -rf.

captcha: explode

Re:My Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

It's bourne shell (sh). and I'm guessing [ "$1"='-dry-run' ] evaluates to true without assigning anything, so everything backed up to /dev/null (the bit-bucket), and then the [ "$1"!='-dry-run' ] also evaluated to true.
The dry run "worked", so they ran without dry-run, and backed up to nothing then deleted everything. Dumb script logic anyway, even without the typo. You backup, confirm restore from the backup to the new location, confirm the data between new and old, *then* delete.

My guess was they have a huge encrypted array and were storing the only copy of the encryption keys for that array on the servers they upgraded, so the array still has the data, but it's just unavailable. That's a likely mistake, especially if they were too cheap to keep the old servers off to the side.

Re:My Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know bash, but I'd assume without spaces it's an assignment and with spaces it's a boolean test. I'm really annoyed that languages keep making stupid design choices like this.

Re:My Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

In bash, whitespace is (sometimes) significant.
The major problem is if [ "$1"='-dry-run' ]; where, because there are no spaces around the =, the "[" command (yes, the left-bracket really is a command),
does not see 3 parameters, "$1, = , and '-dry-run' but a single parameter, which evaluates as true.

Re:My Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone explain this for those of us who don't live and breath bash?

Due to the broken nature of how the if statements are written (with no whitespace between the = and != operators in each statement), both if statements will return true and hence execute. The first if statement is only supposed to execute if -dry-run is specified as an argument to the script, but due to this error will be executed regardless, and hence the backup target will be set to null (nothing). The second if statement is only supposed to execute if this ISN'T a dry run, but will be executed regardless due to the same bug. Ergo, the backup target will be set to null, the backup will be written to null (i.e. never actually written to disk) and the source files will be deleted.

Programming jokes are best done in a pseudo-code form with enough legitbality that even a non-programmer could understand the flow, but when someone actually uses a proper programming or scripting language for the joke, its effect is lost due to being difficulty to parse. Or in other words, programmers (and geeks in general) make for terrible comedians.

Re:My Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy explanation:

Critical code walkthroughs are imperative for the enterprise.
Or:
You failed your boot camp.
You are self taught and you think (or the boss thinks) you are THE computing god.

Result:
This is why we can't have nice things.

Re:My Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

https://stackoverflow.com/a/31300404

Re:My Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

I am shocked!

[Anonymous Coward]

MySpace still exists?!?!

No Words

[gx5000]

Over thirty years in this biz and I have no words.
All my Clients have onsite and offsite backups, Incremental and Full.
Even I do. What the hell dude.

Pull a Trump

[ZipXap]

Tell an obvious lie, because it just doesn't matter anymore.

Who is Andy Baio?

[Anonymous Coward]

Was he that guy in Happy Days?

Wasted Space

[sdinfoserv]

After reading this article, I logged into myspace .... All my shit is gone, apparently I've not posted anything in more than a decade. No loss. What's more, the interface is absolutely garbage... pointless videos and never ending right scroll? It looks like an aborted attempt to combine MSNBC with the most pointless, worst music videos ever created.

Linus Torvalds' backup policy

[DrYak]

"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).

Torrents

[DrYak]

The Pirate Bay never stored any files...

All jokes aside, in all seriousness, that's the whole advantage of torrents:
the indexing website doesn't hold any actual content-data.
the *users* are the one that store the actual content.

Which means that using torrent for content distribution will by core design "automagically" scale with the populiarity of the data.
Think about, e.g., Linux distributions (random example: RaspBian), every now and then they release a new version. All the interested users download a new image (in our exemple: to "burn/etch" onto a boot SD card for their Raspberry Pis). Then it's calm and only basal load until the next release. By using the torrent as a distribution mean, means that during the peak (all users rushing to fetch the upgrade) the rushing users provide the storage each other. ...well until something is so un-popular that there are no seed left.

Live by the cloud, die by the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Live by the cloud, die by the cloud.
If you put things in the cloud and don't have a paid contract, it can disappear at any point. Inside that paid contract, there should be availability promises and clearly spelled out repercussions.

If the contract doesn't say what compensation a paid user gets for every outage, then it is a bad contract and your legal team should be fired.

If you are happy with a non-paid service provider, then you need to keep any data you don't want to lose and have backups for it.

You know, common sense.

This applies to MySqace, Google-anything, Facebook, tweter, whatever.

No way this could be accidental

[erp_consultant]

What is the first step of any server migration? Take a backup. Worst case you can go back to where you started with no data loss. Failing that they don't have a backup from yesterday? Or last week? No large scale operation like this could ever operate without backups.

No...this data was intentionally wiped. Maybe pressure from the artists or record companies about storing potentially illegal copies of music. Whatever the reason. I know that nobody really uses MySpace anymore but the least they could do is just be honest about it. Just tell the user community that you were forced to take the music files down for copyright infringement, or whatever the reason was. But don't come up with this BS story about a botched server migration. Pathetic.

Re:No way this could be accidental

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

What is the first step of any server migration? Take a backup. Worst case you can go back to where you started with no data loss. Failing that they don't have a backup from yesterday? Or last week? No large scale operation like this could ever operate without backups.

No...this data was intentionally wiped.

While I agree that it was likely wiped for one of the many good reasons others have provided, as an IT veteran I sure wouldn't say "no large scale operation like this could ever operate without backups." I can totally believe that some companies would do that. Look at how many posters said "I didn't even know Myspace was still around". Me too. I also didn't know, but I never used it. I knew about it, but just wasn't interested in it at the time. Such a company probably isn't hiring the best people to work for its IT department and they probably don't have oodles of cash to spend on fault tolerance.

Also, I could certainly believe that they did have backups of the whole thing going back 12+ years and that they didn't ever bother to test them and the backups failed to restore the data. That happens a lot in the industry that small, stupidly run companies won't test disaster recovery at all and then when a disaster hits, they find that they weren't prepared for it. I seem to recall some small companies we've had articles about that had similar stories and they went out of business. They had some kind of hardware failure and the backups failed and they were out of business. So while right now I lean towards it being a deliberate action, I'm not ready to rule out good old fashioned incompetence.

Black and white pictures...

[Anonymous Coward]

with a description written IN PENCIL on the back will last for 100 years.
My mom was a genealogy buff.

Re: Black and white pictures...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, we were going through some 90 year old pictures after my wife's grandmother died, and they have started to degrade. We are scanning them in high resolution before they disappear forever.

Re: Black and white pictures...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are going through that effort then you should get some silver prints made of those scans to ensure that a copy exists in the future.

In other news:

[Rick Schumann]

In other news: MySpace still exists in 2019? Unbelievable.

First things first

[McFortner]

Before doing work with critical data, ALWAYS mount a Scratch Monkey.

Whoops.

[Qbertino]

EOM

Nothing on the site about it now

[Headw1nd]

Went over there to check their spin, but right now they have nothing up about it. Could they have been wrong, and recovered the data?

Pepper Ridge NSA Farms remembers

[Anonymous Coward]

Just give them a call. Im sure they have copies.

Oh, and i want that porn video i found in August 3rd 1998 with the chick with the purple hair. Since you are calling, can you ask them to get me that as well?

not all gone

[crgrace]

For what it's worth, I just checked my old band's Myspace and all the photos and songs I uploaded there (stopped using it in 2009) are still there. I'm downloading everything to local storage now just in case there is something up there I don't have backed up elsewhere.

Re:not all gone

[crgrace]

replying to myself.

So, it turns out about 1/3 of the photos and songs I had uploaded there are gone. Weird.

Need to test both backup and RESTORE

[Immerial]

OR the backup process was completely borken (not even new material) and they never knew until they tried to retrieve the backups. That's why it is always important to constantly test the full backup process... backup AND restore... to make sure everything is working okay. The problem with doing it this way is that it takes time and most people/businesses don't want to deal with it and skip the restore part. But oh look... that last software patch made the backups unreadable... doh! ;)

Good news, everyone!

[No Longer an AC]

Way back in 2002 or 2003, a couple of my friends told me about this awesome internet site called MySpace and so I started an account...and I really didn't find it that interesting, but I uploaded a stupid picture of myself partying in Las Vegas. It's nothing too scandalous. I'm just very drunk and holding up a beer with a big grin on my face.

And then I forgot about it until there seemed to be a movement to delete your MySpace account so I did.

I thought the internet never forgets, but if that picture has been lost that's just fine with me.

Trial balloon

[Areyoukiddingme]

To all those asking, "How could this happen?" It didn't. This is MySpace taste testing the idea of nuking their old data to see if anyone really cares. If their page hits drop precipitously, if new uploads drop dramatically, they will "find a backup" and put (some of) the old stuff back online. If none of the metrics they care about change much, the loss will persist and MySpace will go on as it has been.

incompetence at an also-ran

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that MySpace is an also-ran, I don't think it's too far out to chalk this up to incompetence.

Corporate suicide?

[Anonymous Coward]

...I'm wondering if this was intentional because they are trying to bail out of their failing business? Possibly some kind insurance fraud? (can user data be insured for money?)

I don't know all of the fine details in the business workings of Myspace, but it seems like this is what they are trying to do.

All for the best...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there's less embarrassing stuff now there now for a lot of people who finialy grown up.

Unbelievable... MySpace still exists?

[Nocturrne]

Sorry, but seeing myspace mentioned, at all, was the most amazing part.

Cost of storage....

[Heebie]

Wow! That means their costs for storage just plummeted! They're going to save a crapload of cash due to this "mistake" !!!

Re: Laugh now, cry later. The Internet is evolving

[Anonymous Coward]

I refuse to click that link, because as long as I do not click it, it means FidoNet is a friendly place full of network nodes linked by puppies and usb stick holstered collars.

MySpace Data Loss

[Anonymous Coward]

...All three users affected...

Culture Is Safe In Corporate Hands!

[Anonymous Coward]

Look how much they care about their responsibility to future generations! BIGLY safe!!

Re: "full of 5"1/4 floppy dick, some hard"

[Anonymous Coward]

Homoerotic pervert trolls sure do have a hard on for President Trump.

Data retention

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank gawd the anonymous hackers still have my login email and password! If that had been lost I wouldn't even be able to pay them bitcoins for being able to get into my account seeing as I haven't use the account since 2001.

People actually still listen to MP3's?

[Anonymous Coward]

FLAC, Free Lossless Audio Codec. A lilbit larger files, a lot better sound.
People still use Myspace?

He has everything else

[Tablizer]

Has anyone asked Putie?

The real ? - Why is myspace doing anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, just shut it down already.

I'm glad they lost everything

[Anonymous Coward]

It saves me the time of looking up my old Myspace password on the darknet, and then deleting those old photos manually

sorry - not sorry - business as usual

[Anonymous Coward]

Business as usual. Sorry, not sorry. This is what I have come to expect of tech companies, including the data loss or spill with a shoulder shrug knowing nothing will happen to them.

What about the rights now that the content is gone

[jaa101]

So I assume MySpace had the usual terms for uploads whereby you granted them all the rights to the content: perpetual, irrevocable, sublicensable, blah, blah... Now that they’ve lost the content, do they legally still own these licences? My guess is that they do but proving things in court without the content will be problematic. I bet there will be some interesting cases in the future out of this. If they’re worth enough we might even find out that MySpace magically does have backups after all.

Get off the cloud!

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to go back to client-server. Local LAN.
I'll grab my diskettes and boot it up.

Silicon Valley Razor

[astrofurter]

"Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice."

Armor all

[Confused]

Thanks for the hint, I'll try that.

history and possible remedy

[Anonymous Coward]

archiveteam wiki article on Myspace

How do I get my shit back? Did Archive Team save it?

        We thought it would be there, or that they would give some warning and a way to retrieve data if they suddenly decided to gut everything. I just lost what amounts to 7 years of a diary, travel stories, reflections, memories of my (now dead) father, 7 years of my 20s just vanished, gone.. It's not upsetting, it's devastating. I'm grief stricken... silly me, thinking my content was mine.It's not even like a hard drive crash, a hard drive can be easily backed up but blogs were notoriously hard to, maybe purposely hard to. And now..all gone.

Archive Team was unable to rescue any Myspace blogs or videos. Even we cannot do anything about vast deletions of material at no notice. We're sorry.

Jim Youngkin has some hints for recovering your stuff. This uses Google's cache, so if you're reading this long after June 2013, it probably won't work, and if your blogs were friends-only it definitely won't work.

Cher-onically, the link to Jim Younkin's tips was 404, I replaced it with the wayback version.

i lost all of my yahoo email

[mapkinase]

when i tried to move it from yahoo to gmail. No email at yahoo, no copy at gmail.

Myspace

[indianmusic93]

The true story is that myspace is still able to work at all. I thought it shut down years earlier.