JournalSpace shuts down due to no backups

JournalSpace, a 6 year old blog hosting service, closed shop on Tuesday after losing all of its users’ data. Details are sketchy, but the company claims the cause was either an OS failure or a disgruntled employee that deleted the data.

Regardless of the cause, since the JournalSpace had no backups, in addition to the death of the company, all of the bloggers who hosted their sites with the company lost their data. Many are trying to reassemble their years of blogging from a combination of Google cache results and other pieces.

Read more about this story at Slashdot and TechCrunch or read the company’s post “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper” where they are also listing the domain for sale.

A few key takeaways:
* Mirroring - JournalSpace had been mirroring their data, meaning two drives would have the exact same data. While often mistaken for backup because this protects from a single hard drive failure, this is open to all other causes of data loss such a virus, fire, user error, etc.
* Data Recovery- most people realize they should do backups, but they put it off, and in the back of their head think “worst case, I’ll take it to one of those drive recovery places.” Alas, as JournalSpace discovered, even the professionals at DriveSavers can only recover data in certain lucky cases.
* Cost - if you think doing backups is too expensive, try not doing backups. JournalSpace says they spent as much on their attempt to recover the data as they had made in the entire year prior, did not succeed, and paid the ultimate corporate price.

Six years of effort building a company and volumes of users’ data lost is really unfortunate; if you have not been doing backups, make this your wake up call.