The Tecker

Journalspace.com was a place for people to blog and share pictures, etc. However, their database was overwritten and they had no real backup, so their company is toast.

One might ask why they did not have a backup.

Well, they did, sorta. They relied on a RAID configuration to keep their data safe. So if one of the drives failed, they just swapped it out for it's backup drive. However, in Journalspace's case, the drive did not fail, it was overwritten which also means (because the drives are configured in a RAID format) the other one had the copy written over too!

The moral? Don't rely on any one technology to keep your data safe. In this case it was RAID, that didn't turn out the intended results. The technology didn't fail, it did its job by copying the one drive, it just had no way of knowing that it was not supposed too.

So remember people backup your data often on removable formats, and always have a backup kept off site too!

---Info for any Journalspace users---

• You can find out more information what happened. [Journalspace News]

• A blog post about how to attempt to recover your posts and pictures via Google's cache. [Andrew's Blog]
• Journalspace also has a twitter account set up so you can view the updates [jsupgrades@twitter]
• Also the company is planning to release the source code for the site to the open source community

If anything else comes up, we'll keep you posted here at The Tecker!