MySpace loses 12 years of data

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Remember MySpace?

The mention of the first ever social media network prompted comments such as ‘Wow! That still exists?’ and nostalgic recollections from members of our team (excluding those under the age of 25). We discussed MySpace Tom, the agonies of deciding which friends to have listed in your top 8 and of course choosing your favourite song to play on your profile. 

For those too young to remember, MySpace was founded in 2003 and became the first form of social media primarily used for uploading music. Many artists rose to fame after being discovered on the platform including Calvin Harris, Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen. Its popularity grew so much that in 2006 it overtook Google to become the most visited site in the US.

So, after we briefly reminisced, we began to discuss the reason that brought the aged social network to our attention after all these years: MySpace has just admitted to losing 12 years of music uploads after a failed server migration over a year ago.

Back in February 2018, MySpace started to receive complaints from users unable to play video or audio files which had been uploaded earlier than 2015. The company reportedly posted on their support pages that there was a major maintenance project underway and warned that some video and audio would be unavailable whilst this was carried out.

This then seemed to become an ongoing, unresolved issue, with MySpace eventually divulging to users that they had experienced data loss during the server migration some 8 months previous.

This admission has only recently gone public with this official statement on their site:

"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. We apologise for the inconvenience."

Some experts however are sceptical. Due to the difficulty and expense of a server migration of this size, some allege that MySpace admitting to an accidental loss sounds better than confessing to not wanting to invest into migrating and hosting 12 years of old MP3 files.

Although the social media platform was bypassed by the giants of social media including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, many people still used the site as an archive for files which seem now to be forever lost.

At this time there has been no other word from MySpace as to why this has happened. Did the backup fail? Was there a backup?

We’ll have to watch this space (no pun intended).

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