'Zodiac Island' Makers Say ISP Worker Wiped an Entire Season

itwbennett writes "The creators of 'Zodiac Island' say they lost an entire season of their syndicated children's television show after a former employee at their Internet service provider wiped out more than 300GB of video files. eR1 World Network, the show's creator, is suing the ISP, CyberLynk of Franklin, Wisconsin, and its former employee, Michael Jewson, for damages, saying CyberLynk should have done a better job of protecting its data."

Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why you need them.

Welcome to /. hell day!!!!

[Dutchmaan]

Story post time is officially Apr. 1.... it's /. hell day...

Re:Torrents

[SuricouRaven]

A good point though. Businesses go out of business. Some television of the past has even been deliberatly destroyed for legal reasons, or because it is embarassing to the company today. Still more can no longer be shown for the same reason, and remains locked up in a vault somewhere. VHS tapes degrade quickly, but now the pirates have digital technology, they do serve to preserve - thousands of people with their own stores, independant, backups for each other. They can't be legally compelled to destroy anything, because they just don't care. Companies come and go, but so long as someone is willing to replace the occasional failed hard drive, a pirate collection is forever.

Re:Sorry, but

[Eivind]

It's unreasonable to "rely" on ANY backup-plan whatsoever, without actually regularily testing RESTOREs.

If you buy backup - which is fine - make sure to actually test a restore, and do so REGULARILY.

RTFA and it does not make much sense

[Ecuador]

It was an off-site FTP server for collaboration, are they telling us none of the collaborators had the full set of data? It was "just" 300GB, meaning it could fit easily on an average hard drive.
Furthermore, they say they require all the data to reconstitute the episodes, so every time they needed the episodes, they would download all those 300GB of 6000+ files from FTP and rebuild their episodes? What kind of idiocy is this.
And lastly, did that employee secure erase everything? It was more than a simple rm -rf ?

Re:World Backup Day

[Kilrah_il]

Re: April fools.
I am now announcing that for the next 24h I will not believe any story not originating from Fox News. Since all the major (i.e. serious) papers print fake/prank stories today, I guess it's Fox's time to pull the major prank - print out a real, accurate, fact-filled news item, for once.

The rules

[sjames]

Rule 1, if you upload it to your ISP, keep a backup.

Rule 2, if they say they keep backups, keep a backup, theirs may not be very good.

Rule number 3, if they agree contracturally to make full backups, keep one of your own. They don't care as much about your stuff as you do and they probably have a get out of jail free clause buried somewhere in the fine print.

Re:Torrents

[petermgreen]

True, even a huge chunk of the classic Doctor Who episodes would have been lost, had it not been for archives abroad.

Even with the foreign "archives" (which afaict were often just rolls of film forgotten somewhere) some are still missing and many were recovered in poor condition requiring heavy restoration.

And IIRC we only still have the famous silent film "metropolis" because people who were contractually obliged to destroy their copies didn't actually do so.

Great security and backup practices

[grapeape]

And people wonder why fired IT workers are escorted to the door without being allowed to go back to their desks. All it takes is one idiot to make the rest of the company completely paranoid from that point forward. First rule of IT Staffing: When someone leaves...make sure their access leaves with them. The lack of backups however is inexcusable.