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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) 231

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.

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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

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18, 2019 @10:08AM (#58292004)

    ...and nothing of value was lost.

    • Nothing of value (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Confused ( 34234 ) on Monday March 18, 2019 @10:20AM (#58292080) Homepage

      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.

      • It happened before and it'll happen again.

        Thanks Mr. Heston [imdb.com]. :-)

      • Re:Nothing of value (Score:5, Informative)

        by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Monday March 18, 2019 @10:49AM (#58292272)

        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%.

      • 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.

        • 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?)

          • 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 la

            • 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) whi

      • 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 back

        • 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.

      • 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.
        • by saider ( 177166 )

          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.

      • Get used it it.

        Indeed; and who can forget The Big One from 2007?
        https://www.theonion.com/break... [theonion.com]

      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        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.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • 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?
      • by Khyber ( 864651 )

        "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.

  • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday March 18, 2019 @10:08AM (#58292006) Homepage Journal

    nothing of value was lost?

    To be honest I thought the whole site was gone years ago, or was that Geocities?

    • Re:Okay but (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Monday March 18, 2019 @11:03AM (#58292334)

      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.

      • 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.

      • 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.

    • by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      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.

  • by magusxxx ( 751600 ) <magusxxx_2000@yaOPENBSDhoo.com minus bsd> on Monday March 18, 2019 @10:09AM (#58292016)

    "Biggest-Takedown-Notice-Ever."

  • by Daerath ( 625570 ) on Monday March 18, 2019 @10:13AM (#58292044)

    The real story is that MySpace is still operational at all. I thought it shut down years ago.

  • 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.
  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday March 18, 2019 @10:20AM (#58292082)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • 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.
      • 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! ;)
    • Feels right. They don't want to pay to keep it available, so drop it. Perfectly within their rights to do so.

    • 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.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • 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.

    • 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?

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • 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.

        • 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.

    • 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

    • 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 t

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18, 2019 @10:21AM (#58292088)

    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.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18, 2019 @11:26AM (#58292460)

      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.

    • 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 t

      • by kriston ( 7886 )

        Don't forget FidoNet [wikipedia.org].

      • 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

  • They just ended their business then.
    Because nobody'll ever trust their platform again.
    And they just lost terabytes or exabytes of content.

  • by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Monday March 18, 2019 @10:25AM (#58292104) Journal
    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.

    • 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.

      • by Matheus ( 586080 )

        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

    • 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.

      • 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 [myspace.com] 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

    • by Ksevio ( 865461 )

      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 se

    • by mx+b ( 2078162 )

      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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by guygo ( 894298 ) on Monday March 18, 2019 @10:25AM (#58292108)
    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 (Score:4, Insightful)

      by doconnor ( 134648 ) on Monday March 18, 2019 @11:00AM (#58292312) Homepage

      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.

      • by PPH ( 736903 )

        Hah! I backed up all my stuff on Megaupload.

    • ... so put 'em on the cloud...

      Put them in two clouds.

    • by doom ( 14564 )

      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".

    • 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.

  • foiled! [youtu.be]

  • So was all that old stuff hosted on one server?
  • 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.

  • I believe they will have a free backup copy
  • by Anonymous Coward

    How the actual fuck could they lose everything? Why do the not have any backups?

    What the actual fuck?

  • 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 [archive.org].

  • 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 somethi

  • Piracy as backup (Score:2, Insightful)

    by 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.
  • .. 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 (Score:5, Funny)

    by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Monday March 18, 2019 @11:18AM (#58292422)

    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.

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • by erp_consultant ( 2614861 ) on Monday March 18, 2019 @12:10PM (#58292656)

    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.

    • 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

  • In other news: MySpace still exists in 2019? Unbelievable.
  • Before doing work with critical data, ALWAYS mount a Scratch Monkey [wikipedia.org].
  • EOM

  • 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?
  • 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.

    • by crgrace ( 220738 )

      replying to myself.

      So, it turns out about 1/3 of the photos and songs I had uploaded there are gone. Weird.

  • 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 bee

  • 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.

  • Sorry, but seeing myspace mentioned, at all, was the most amazing part.

  • 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 al

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