As the article points out, this wasn’t due to vandalism, but merely negligence — they never made backups. But it’s even worse than that — this wasn’t a sudden hard drive failure, but a server migration gone wrong. It was entirely self-inflicted.
It’s not clear to me that MySpace didn’t have any backups at all; this just seems like an assumption. Another possibility is that they did have backups but lost the backups as well, or that the backups were corrupted too.
I tried to find a more detailed article, but I can’t find anything. This reddit post inspired a few news stories, but this looks like all the info we have from MySpace (which is from 7 months ago).
It’s not hard to imagine how that may have happened; the old servers were set up by people who no longer work there. Due to full disk or whatever the backups aren’t being created any more, and the alerts for that go to an email address that no one reads.
Another option is that they lost it on purpose, and saying it was a failure is an easier for users to accept than thinking MySpace deliberately deleted everything because they don’t want to pay to host it.
Honestly I’m mostly surprised that they still had music uploads from 2003, I’m also surprised that MySpace meaningfully exists enough for anyone to notice that they lost data.
One of the ways people get locked into these services is putting their photos, videos, etc in them instead of local copy. Then, it’s hard to move them to a new service. So, I knew people just a few years ago that, despite using only Facebook, linked me to MySpace and Facebook accounts to see old and new images. Maybe same thing with music for some people.
The question is, who should pay for those archives?
Sweden has a long-standing law that each book published here has to provide copy to KB (Royal Library). In the 1920s, with the rise of radio and movies, this law was expanded to sound and video too.
All this stuff is a massive boon to researchers and part of our cultural heritage. But it comes at a not insignificant cost.
I would say that is a question, not the question. =)
I would also argue that governments are probably not the right people/entities to be archiving raw content for free and public use as history has shown us time and again why that doesn’t work. In my limited dealings with the internet archive, it seems as though they are funded to a point where the mission is well and alive, although I’m sure they would say more would be better.
I would also argue that governments are probably not the right people/entities to be archiving raw content for free and public use as history has shown us time and again why that doesn’t work.
I’m also confused by that comment. I always generally thought that the Library of Congress was fairly successful. Unless GP was speaking about spans multiple millennia, in which case I doubt a company dedicated to preserving anything would outlive most nation states.
This is an argument for distribution, not necessarily against state management. Most larger countries have rules similar to Sweden, which practically means that all media published in multiple states are automatically archived multiple times.
Considering that archiving is a task that most government organisations have the most experience and practice in, I’m hard pressed to throw that idea out. There’s quite a high bar to reach to even archive better than the most underfunded of government orgs.
I can’t speak for dallas, but a historical precedent that supports his position is the decline of the Library of Alexandria. The Nazi book burnings are a more intentional example.
I really don’t know what you mean. This is an argument that governments are not the best entities to archive and preserve works?
Maybe ISPs could just pledge to fund the Internet Archive is a small percentage of revenue, or have a formal agreement to donate hardware and bandwidth. But ultimately, it’s going to be a hard corporate decision to pay to host some punk bands 10 year old songs about vomit.
When music piracy was thriving, even most obscure albums was distributed to multiple nodes and was readily available in various networks. This included music that was initially released by (usually underground) artists for free. In the age of streaming services most people even deleted their old collections or didn’t migrate them from old PCs.
Moreover, as streaming services grow in popularity, I observe loss of interest to obscure/rare music, now many people only want “new, fresh and trendy”, this includes not only pop music made by large corporations, but indie and even outright underground projects too, but those who by random factors reached popularity on internet, and this popularity lasts for a very short time. Myspace, being a streaming service (if I understand it right, I never figured out how to use it, with its arcane UI), could be large company now, but missed this opportunity, mostly due to horrible UX and lack of focus.
Hah, this was what I was sort of thinking, maybe they did it on purpose? They’ve got all this content that people have sort of left behind on the platform, they’re looking at their numbers and the vast majority of the music and photos aren’t being accessed in any meaningful way and haven’t been since the early 2000’s. 40% of the songs are about some girl/guy that some girl/guy was in love with in high school and how they broke their heart. And they’re sitting there saddled with storing it all for…?
It was one of those, someone tripped over the cable to the rack and unplugged it, then someone accidentally tipped the rack over, and accidentally pushed it from the server room out to the curb, where they accidentally loaded it into the back of a large truck, which just so happened to end up at an incinerator and the truck just happened to be parked near the incinerator when the driver just happened to push the lever to dump the contents of the truck, then “Oh, man, did anyone see where that rack with all the old music and stuff in it? Uh oh…”..
Okay. Let’s all pretend this isn’t for real and definitely not tell all of my old bands from my 20s.
Also, is anyone else surprised that someone uploaded music after 2015? or do we just assume this is clever phrasing to prevent us from realizing that’s all the music they had? :D
As the article points out, this wasn’t due to vandalism, but merely negligence — they never made backups. But it’s even worse than that — this wasn’t a sudden hard drive failure, but a server migration gone wrong. It was entirely self-inflicted.
It’s not clear to me that MySpace didn’t have any backups at all; this just seems like an assumption. Another possibility is that they did have backups but lost the backups as well, or that the backups were corrupted too.
I tried to find a more detailed article, but I can’t find anything. This reddit post inspired a few news stories, but this looks like all the info we have from MySpace (which is from 7 months ago).
It’s not hard to imagine how that may have happened; the old servers were set up by people who no longer work there. Due to full disk or whatever the backups aren’t being created any more, and the alerts for that go to an email address that no one reads.
Another option is that they lost it on purpose, and saying it was a failure is an easier for users to accept than thinking MySpace deliberately deleted everything because they don’t want to pay to host it.
Honestly I’m mostly surprised that they still had music uploads from 2003, I’m also surprised that MySpace meaningfully exists enough for anyone to notice that they lost data.
One of the ways people get locked into these services is putting their photos, videos, etc in them instead of local copy. Then, it’s hard to move them to a new service. So, I knew people just a few years ago that, despite using only Facebook, linked me to MySpace and Facebook accounts to see old and new images. Maybe same thing with music for some people.
Reminded of https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/10/05/recipes/
this is truly sad, but it also proves how important projects like the internet archive are for humanity.
The question is, who should pay for those archives?
Sweden has a long-standing law that each book published here has to provide copy to KB (Royal Library). In the 1920s, with the rise of radio and movies, this law was expanded to sound and video too.
All this stuff is a massive boon to researchers and part of our cultural heritage. But it comes at a not insignificant cost.
I would say that is a question, not the question. =)
I would also argue that governments are probably not the right people/entities to be archiving raw content for free and public use as history has shown us time and again why that doesn’t work. In my limited dealings with the internet archive, it seems as though they are funded to a point where the mission is well and alive, although I’m sure they would say more would be better.
how so?
I’m also confused by that comment. I always generally thought that the Library of Congress was fairly successful. Unless GP was speaking about spans multiple millennia, in which case I doubt a company dedicated to preserving anything would outlive most nation states.
I can’t speak for dallas, but a historical precedent that supports his position is the decline of the Library of Alexandria. The Nazi book burnings are a more intentional example.
That said, distributed & immutable archival of documents could make it so that it doesn’t matter as much who the archiving entities are.
This is an argument for distribution, not necessarily against state management. Most larger countries have rules similar to Sweden, which practically means that all media published in multiple states are automatically archived multiple times.
Considering that archiving is a task that most government organisations have the most experience and practice in, I’m hard pressed to throw that idea out. There’s quite a high bar to reach to even archive better than the most underfunded of government orgs.
I really don’t know what you mean. This is an argument that governments are not the best entities to archive and preserve works?
OK conceded, a question.
Maybe ISPs could just pledge to fund the Internet Archive is a small percentage of revenue, or have a formal agreement to donate hardware and bandwidth. But ultimately, it’s going to be a hard corporate decision to pay to host some punk bands 10 year old songs about vomit.
yah, that’s not a bad idea. =)
When music piracy was thriving, even most obscure albums was distributed to multiple nodes and was readily available in various networks. This included music that was initially released by (usually underground) artists for free. In the age of streaming services most people even deleted their old collections or didn’t migrate them from old PCs.
Moreover, as streaming services grow in popularity, I observe loss of interest to obscure/rare music, now many people only want “new, fresh and trendy”, this includes not only pop music made by large corporations, but indie and even outright underground projects too, but those who by random factors reached popularity on internet, and this popularity lasts for a very short time. Myspace, being a streaming service (if I understand it right, I never figured out how to use it, with its arcane UI), could be large company now, but missed this opportunity, mostly due to horrible UX and lack of focus.
Personally, I’m glad all my adolescent, half-baked, bedroom recording projects have now certifiably been erased from the internet
Hah, this was what I was sort of thinking, maybe they did it on purpose? They’ve got all this content that people have sort of left behind on the platform, they’re looking at their numbers and the vast majority of the music and photos aren’t being accessed in any meaningful way and haven’t been since the early 2000’s. 40% of the songs are about some girl/guy that some girl/guy was in love with in high school and how they broke their heart. And they’re sitting there saddled with storing it all for…?
It was one of those, someone tripped over the cable to the rack and unplugged it, then someone accidentally tipped the rack over, and accidentally pushed it from the server room out to the curb, where they accidentally loaded it into the back of a large truck, which just so happened to end up at an incinerator and the truck just happened to be parked near the incinerator when the driver just happened to push the lever to dump the contents of the truck, then “Oh, man, did anyone see where that rack with all the old music and stuff in it? Uh oh…”..
Well, that’s “Noise Pollution - Noise Pollution” lost forever, unless I have it backed up. Damn. Entire generation of garage, underground genres, lost
Okay. Let’s all pretend this isn’t for real and definitely not tell all of my old bands from my 20s.
Also, is anyone else surprised that someone uploaded music after 2015? or do we just assume this is clever phrasing to prevent us from realizing that’s all the music they had? :D
Is this a different event than all the images that were lost?