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

[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

[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.

Comic Book guy replied,

[magusxxx]

"Biggest-Takedown-Notice-Ever."

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....

[HornWumpus]

Somebody was using Myspace in the last 3 years?

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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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... :)

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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?

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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

[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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

Re:Nothing of value was lost

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

It is local cooling, actually.

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.

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" !!!

He has everything else

[Tablizer]

Has anyone asked Putie?

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.

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.

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.