MySpace appear to have lost all the music and images that was uploaded over a twelve year period from when they launched in 2003 right through to 2015. Anything uploaded that’s more than a few years old has gone forever unless you have an offline backup.
It appears to have happened during a server migration with files becoming corrupted and unable to be transferred to the updated site. It may not bother most people and indeed you’d be forgiven for asking who are MySpace anyway, but in the pre Facebook era it was the site to be on and at one time more popular than Google.
MySpace launched musical careers as one of the first streaming sites where unknown bands could get their music in front of millions before it was picked up by mainstream radio stations and estimates say that some 50 million songs from 14 million artists have gone missing – some perhaps forever unless someone somewhere still has a copy they bootlegged or saved.
MySpace users have had issues accessing older music for some months and coming clean would appear to be the likely explanation although their advice to make sure that you have back ups is a bit late… it’s hard to back up something that’s already long gone. It does raise some interesting questions as to have safe cloud storage is at all and best advice would be to consider it as a back up for your own hard disk copies.
The problem is that your own hard drives can fail, USB sticks get lost and even tape or CDs can get damaged. MySpace isn’t the first cloud storage solution to lose data and they’re unlikely to be the last, so if your data matters then make sure it is at least saved in multiple places both on and off line.
Don’t be the person who’s laptop gets fried and their data is gone forever but also don’t rely on cloud storage to be around forever. Bad enough losing your music and pictures, but HMRC won’t be amused if you lose your tax records.
