Back up Now! MySpace Just Lost Everything Uploaded Between 2003-2015

MySpace has admitted they have lost all music, photo and video files uploaded to its servers more than three years ago.

"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 apologize for the inconvenience and suggest that you retain your back up copies. If you would like more information, please contact our Data Protection Officer, Dr. Jana Jentzsch at [email protected]"

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Users on Reddit started to report that links of the site weren’t working and that the MySpae music player wasn’t functioning. At that time MySpace said they were aware of the issue and were working on it.

Bye Bye Forever

But the bad news for people with precious data stored on MySpace - it is officially gone forever. Scrolling through the Reddit page connected to the MySpace link is a heartbreaking tale of always back up your stuff.

Some people tell of the music of their first bands being lost and even more crushingly on user describes how he lost a song played by his now deceased son. While many people moved away from regularly using MySpace a long time ago, this massive archive loss is a blatant reminder to back up your content from social media sites.

It should come as no surprise if one day Facebook and Instagram also break the news that they have lost archived data. Pictures posted directly from smartphones are likely the most vulnerable as copies might get deleted off the device to save storage space.

Back up back up back up

To protect yourself, its a good idea to set up a regular back up routine of all your favorite photos, videos, and music. You could go the hardware track and back up everything to an external hard drive or place everything in a cloud-based storage system.

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Another option is to place things with The Internet Archive, a non-profit library of accessible content. The library provides free access to everyone from academics to the general public to everything in its collection that ranges from feature films and documentaries, books to community-generated content like videos and photos.

The Internet Archive keeps at least two copies of everything it owns. A single copy of its collection occupies 30+ Petabytes of server space (and it stores at least 2 copies of everything). 

The archive began in 1996 by archiving the Internet itself, a medium that was just beginning to grow in use. Today by signing up with a free account you can access over 20+ years of internet and cultural history.

The archive says it currently contains over 330 billion web pages, 20 million books, and texts, 4.5 million audio recordings (including 180,000 live concerts), 4 million videos (including 1.6 million Television News programs), 3 million images and 200,000 software programs.