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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.
The real story is that MySpace is still operational at all. I thought it shut down years ago.
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."
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
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
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.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I found the bug in my migration script. That damned byzantine "sh" language syntax strikes again:
Looks like I forgot the spaces around "=". Oh well, live and learn.