Blogging Community Destroyed by Lack of Backup

By Greg McNevin

January 6, 2009: The online blogging community JournalSpace.com has become a deft example of the importance of proper backups, with every last bit of the company’s data disappearing at the hands of a disgruntled employee.

While not as large as services such as Google’s Blogger, Microsoft’s Spaces or Wordpress.org, the six-year old JournalSpace.com had built up a community of bloggers and a significant repository of data. All of which disappeared in an instant, allegedly at the hands of a bitter employee, never to be seen again thanks to a non-existent backup regime.

JournalSpace ran its servers in a raid configuration, with a backup drive duplicating the server’s main drive, which housed the SQL database with all of the community’s data. If one drive failed, the data would be recoverable from the other.

However, as those behind the service found out, if the main drive was intentionally wiped clean, then the secondary drive would do what it had been set up to do, and clone the main one. The drives were sent to a recovery program, but ultimately the data was unrecoverable, effectively putting an end to the service.

“The list of potential causes for this disaster is a short one. It includes a catastrophic failure by the operating system (OS X Server, in case you're interested), or a deliberate effort,” reads a statement currently posted on www.journalspace.com and tagged ‘this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper’.

“A disgruntled member of the Lagomorphics team sabotaged some key servers several months ago after he was caught stealing from the company; as awful as the thought is, we can't rule out the possibility of additional sabotage.”

The incident illustrates just how important a regular backup regime is, and how those backups need to be stored securely off site to ensure no disasters – natural or man-made – can undermine a business.

For the users of JournalSpace who may have lost years of their time and effort, it also shows the importance of keeping regular local backups of your own work and not trusting everything to the cloud.

The JournalSpace.com domain and trademark are now up for sale on eBay with the hope that someone will re-vitalise the service. Its owners are moving on, and say that the software running it could be open sourced at some point down the line.

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