Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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%.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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.