I wonder
Will we ever see a time when Facebook loses everything, and people take a year to notice? Or is that just wishful thinking?
MySpace, the Norma Desmond of social networking platforms, appears to have lost all the music uploaded to the site since its founding in 2003 through 2015, a blunder the company reportedly attributes to a failed server migration. The lost files – said to amount to 50 million songs from 14 million artists – appear to be …
What would be the cost of hosting 50 million old MP3s?
==
call it 5MB per MP3 so around 250 TB's of storage [now] going spare ........................
I'm another that thinks they just CBA keeping the old stuff, and would also wonder how they 'lost' everything and only appear to have a single copy too, whatever happened to BACKUP, then BACKUP again, before doing ANYTHING D/B related
That really depends on the infrastructure in use and the number and structure of the backup strategies used. While large to most small to medium businesses, it's not to enterprises nor my personal systems. I tally up here at 8 TB globally unique files and just happen to be creating new post-apocalypse copies. Even with high-end, latest, greatest, geographically dispersed strategy we really aren't talking about that much money for an enterprise at their scale.
This sounds rather more as if they hadn't been doing test restores for quite some time. You are only as good as your last restore.
[For absolute protection, you need storage amounts around twenty times the globally unique data sources. I'm not at that level but working on it,.]
if a typcal mp3 file is 6Mbytes in length [a bit large, but good for ballparking it] then 50 million would be 300 million megabytes, or about 300 terabytes. That's about $10k worth of hard disks, not including config'ing them as a RAID [which would be what, 4 times as many?]. So, not a lot, compared to annual revenue.
And with all of the other "old crap" that goes with those mp3s, probably 10 to 100 times as much stuff [photos, videos, etc.] in total. So you're talking maybe $100k to $1M.
Still "do-able" but bottom line is what it is. To your old schtuff that you stored on MySpace: Buh-BYE!
(yeah "the cloud" is HIGHLY overrated)
They'd use an AI to rebuild your past profile based on your present profile. Similar to Hollywood movie scripts
We're sorry, but your data was deleted during an upgrade. Our AI has re-imagined your profile, and the new, improved and colorized, data has been re-shared with all your friends. There is no charge for this service.
And who are you, the proud cloud said,
That I must bow so low?
Only a plate of different bits,
That's all the truth I know.
In a coat of rust or a coat of flash,
A cloud still has claws,
And mine are long and sharp, my lord,
As long and sharp as yours.
And so he spoke, and so he spoke,
That lord of MySpace,
But now the rains weep o'er his cloud,
With no one there to retrieve-their-lifes-work.
Yes now the rains weep o'er his cloud,
And not a soul to hear.
Maybe the BIOS battery died and nobody noticed until they tried to reboot?
Pre-migration, MySpace was running on a bunch of pre-HP ProLiant servers, in putty-colored desktop tower cases...which probably still had more than enough CPU cycles to support their current traffic.
"along with the machines capable of reading it"
You would, I would. (Subject to being overruled by manglement of course.)
We are not the people running MySpace. If you've scrapped your original server you might have an Exabyte tape or whatever the original medium was but it's no longer a backup. The requirement of a backup is that you can demonstrate that you can restore it. If you don't have the kit to restore it it's demonstrably not a backup.
"The requirement of a backup is that you can demonstrate that you can restore it. If you don't have the kit to restore it it's demonstrably not a backup."
Sure, in principle. However, when you migrate, you do three things: make a backup immediately prior to migration, retain the backup and all equipment necessary to read it for a good long time after the migration, in case a problem is discovered, and keep the backup itself, effectively forever.
In long-term storage, it's best if you copy the backups onto new media every so often (media degenerates over time, and the nature of media and equipment needed to read it changes over time). Even if you don't refresh, though, it's still advisable to keep the pre-migration backup around. You probably won't need it, but if you do, you'll probably need it very badly. Equipment to read it can be obtained on the used market or fabricated if the need is large enough.
> Yes, along with the machines capable of reading it, until such time as all of that had been archived in an updated format.
...and possibly until copied, or *at the very least* a sanity test done on the backup?
Not been there personally, but have read somewhere about arse-bitings happening to people people not going there...
Or, more likely, a migration plan failed. There was no alternative, and no budget to come up with another one. Moneybags in charge shrugged their collective shoulders because "nobody looks at old stuff online, they will never miss it anyway". So they scrapped the old kit instead of retaining it "just in case", again to save costs (this time on physical storage, tiny square inches cost big bucks in Beverly Hills).
If it's important to you, store it for yourself. Multi-national corporations do not give a flying fuck about individual humans and their needs/wants.
I see a scenario of a Linux server with case sensitive file names being migrated to a Micro-shaft server, with case insensitive file names, some of which overlap the case sensitive ones, resulting in name collision chaos.
[saw that with a perforce repo once, $boss insisted on hosting it on a windows box, but it involved a source repo for building a Linux kernel for embedded devices, and some directories in the kernel source had file names that differed only by case... which meant that perforce couldn't save them in a unique way, causing all KINDS of interesting source tree problems - would have been ok if we'd hosted it on Linux in the FIRST place which is what WE wanted to do, but NO, $boss insisted on a WINDOWS server, "felt" it to be more reliable for who knows WHAT kind of reasoning or lack thereof...]
Anyway, some insight as to what _could_ have happened, maybe like this: 'and then the people doing the migration took some "Dammitol" and, washing them bitter pills down with as much coffee alcohol as they could find, simply announced "cannot be done" and they quietly moved on...'
sounds like an array copy went wrong & the hapless techs initialized the source drives instead of the destination ones (there is a particularly stupidly configured default option in a vendor provided array copy software that I'm vaguely familiar with). Afterwards, the data could have still been accessed, but once the drives are written to... bing bang bong, good luck with that.
Afterwards, well it is possible to forensically recover (most of) the data, but its very expensive & time consuming - they probably just decided to cut their losses
They have bought and extinguished lots of brands. When their friends in corporate (political?) high places say it would be swell if all our media material could be made to disappear, magic happens.
Not that fookbase or goooogle or anyone else can't make YOUR assets disappear. Back up. And then verify you can access your backups on other devices.
Losing files, hit by malware, open holes in critical systems...as an end user, WTF are many of you “professionals” up to?
We need a certification process, rigorously enforced, with huge penalties, so that the slackers, and PHBs in your profession, and owners/shareholders finally own quality and are held financially and legally accountable for failures.
"Err, are you paying MySpace to host your stuff?"
No, but someone was being paid to administer that stuff, and they were the ones that fucked up (unless of course it was a corporate decision, that they've decided to blame on a technical fault).
Sure, it was 'only' MySpace, but one should have enough professional pride not to completely lose that much data even if the users weren't paying.
"We need a certification process, rigorously enforced, with huge penalties, so that the slackers, and PHBs in your profession, and owners/shareholders finally own quality and are held financially and legally accountable for failures."
There are a few things to disentangle here.
1. If MySpace was offering a paid for service there'd likely be contractual terms specifying financial and legal liabilities. It would then be up to their customers to decide whether those would be acceptable for the money being paid. Failure to meet those terms would be breach of contract and normal legal process would be available for redress.
2. AIUI (I never used the service so I'm relying on other comments here) they didn't offer such a service. The users storing data on it didn't pay so, in accordance with the normal rules here, they weren't the customers, they were the product. It's extremely unlikely that the T&Cs would say anything beyond, in effect, "you get what you pay for".
3. A consequence of 2 is that the customers were someone else. Again relying on other comments, they were advertisers. Apart from my customary lack of sympathy for online advertisers we have to consider what their contractual entitlements were. If MySpace had contracts to deliver specified amounts of product and this loss reduces what's delivered then they might have some redress. I'd guess, however, it's more a matter of payment by what's actually delivered so simply less product, less money invoiced. The shareholders might be disappointed but the customer wouldn't be being short-changed and they could always take their custom elsewhere in the future.
4. A consequence of 1 & 2 is that if you want online services of any nature which are of value to you you pay for them. Otherwise you're using somebody else's computer subject to their whims, let alone competence and, paying nothing you're entitled to nothing (but see 5 below).
5. For some categories of data there should be a duty of care. One is personal and financial user data provided in confidence. Another is any user owned data which is not provided to be shared by others. There is a responsibility not to leak that data. Even if the data is provided to be shared there may be limits on the allowed sharing in which case they should be adhered to. That is an area in which there may be a need for certification, at least in relation to personal and financial data, whether it's the users' own or data about third parties as in the case of Equifax. If the volume times sensitivity exceeds tome limit then there is indeed a case for pro-active enforcement in terms of external inspection or audit.
12 years ago, you could have picked up a Pentium class machine on the side of the road, complete with enough hard drive to store copies of all your personal data indefinitely. Except your pr0n of course, but there is no lack of that on TehIntraWebTubes so no real loss if it goes away.
I was born just after 95, i setup a myspace account and after a couple of hours of fiddling with it i realised that "social media" is a hollow replacment for actually socialising. As i recall i swiftly deleted it then went outside to play cricket in the street with my friends.. sadly mine is probably the last generation to actualy do that, and i'm in the minority for having done so.
Alien becuase thats how social media makes me feel.
Sounds like a recording industry group offered them more in cash to lose the files, than the Sat-on-My-Face-All-Night-ers (apologies to Jennifer Saunders) offered to not-lose them. Why is there even the slightest surprise about this story?
Supplementary question, m'lud: were the uploaded-and-later-lost MP3 files authorized copies by the recording companies?
This is the four tops especially requested for you by Karen in HR......
Now if you feel that you can't go on (can't go on)
Because all of your hope is gone (all your hope is gone)
And your life is filled with much confusion (much confusion)
Until happiness is just an illusion (happiness is just an illusion)
And your world around is crumbling down, darlin'
(Reach out) Come on girl reach on out for me
(Reach out) Reach out for me
Hah, I'll be there with a love that will shelter you
I'll be there with a love that will see you through
Hearing that MySpace appears to be still a thing (in the same way that AOL email is still a thing, apparently) I went over there to see what they're doing now, and found that today they're doing...
... exactly nothing. "Sorry, we're just experiencing some technical difficulties right now. Nothing major. Our developers are working on it and Myspace will be back up very soon."
Maybe they found the backup CD-ROMs and are restoring the lost files now?