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

[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.

Comic Book guy replied,

[magusxxx]

"Biggest-Takedown-Notice-Ever."

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.

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

[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

[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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.