Yspace Loses 12 Years of Music Uploads

Myspace still (barely) exists —

Myspace apparently lost 12 years' worth of music, and near no ane noticed

User uploads corrupted in server migration, and Myspace seemingly has no backups.

Overstate / Myspace's music histrion.

Myspace

Myspace has obviously lost most or all of the music files uploaded by its users before 2015, and information technology told users that the information was corrupted beyond repair during a server migration. Myspace apparently admitted the problem to concerned users seven or eight months ago, but so few people noticed that there wasn't any news coverage until the by 24 hours.

Myspace, the in one case-mighty social networking site, has existed since 2003 just has been fading into obscurity for the past decade. Many musicians used to rely on Myspace to spread their music, and over the years it hosted 53 1000000 songs from 14.ii million artists.

Some of Myspace's loyal users noticed more than a year ago that they couldn't play music or download music files and asked Myspace for answers. Myspace initially told those users that information technology would recover the lost data, only months later on it admitted that the files were gone forever.

It isn't clear what caused the information loss other than a "server migration" problem referenced by Myspace, and the company hasn't said whether it kept any backups or what happened to whatsoever such backups. We contacted Myspace today and will update this story if we get any new information.

"No mode to recover the lost data"

In February 2018, a Myspace support rep told a user, "There is an outcome with all songs/videos uploaded over three years agone," according to a transcript of the support email posted on Reddit at the time. "We are aware of the issue and I have been informed the consequence volition be fixed, however, there is no exact fourth dimension frame for when this will be completed. Until this is resolved the option to download is non available."

A few months later, Myspace had worse news for customers.

"Due to a server migration, files were corrupted and unable to be transferred over to our updated site. There is no way to recover the lost data," a Myspace rep told a user in an e-mail posted on Reddit seven months ago.

Around the same fourth dimension, another Reddit user reported seeing this message at the pinnacle of the Myspace music player: "As a result of a server migration projection, any photos, videos, and audio files yous uploaded more than than iii years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest that you retain your fill-in copies."

Myspace'south admissions went mostly unnoticed until another Reddit thread was posted yesterday with the championship "Myspace lost all music uploaded from 2003 to 2015." That thread led to a tweet by Andy Baio, an entrepreneur, blogger, and former CTO of Kickstarter, which got thousands of retweets and likes. Numerous news articles about the trouble have been published today.

"I'1000 securely skeptical this was an accident," Baio wrote. "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.'"

Myspace: Go along backups (even though we didn't)

A Myspace support page says users tin can "download songs and videos with the file type MP4 and M4A" but that "these are the simply file types available to download."

Moreover, the support folio says that "FLV [Flash video] files can no longer be played due to a player update" because Myspace updated the media player to HTML5. "Unfortunately, nosotros practise not offer a manner to play or download these videos," Myspace said.

Another Myspace back up folio titled "Where Is All My Sometime Stuff?" seems to accept worse news for people looking to download old music. "We completely rebuilt Myspace and decided to motility over some of your content from the one-time Myspace," the folio says. The page then lists ii types of quondam content that are nonetheless available: "Photos" and "Friends." Annihilation else is apparently gone.

"If you are looking for something that is not on this list, that means the content is no longer available and cannot exist retrieved," the page says.

Myspace still offers the ability to mind to and upload music. Myspace support pages suggest users to keep extra copies of uploaded content, and that's certainly practiced advice fifty-fifty though Myspace itself may not have followed it. Uploading a file to a social network site is no guarantee that it volition always be available. Even if yous're using a popular site that seems like it could never get the way of Myspace, it's wise to dorsum upwards uploaded files to local disks and/or to a dedicated backup service.

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Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/myspace-apparently-lost-12-years-worth-of-music-and-almost-no-one-noticed/

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