It may not have been the largest free blogging platform available, but for anyone who used JournalSpace for their blog the events of the last week were catastrophically significant.
Three days ago, JournalSpace lost all of its data. Yes, all of it. The hardware itself was intact, which means that either the OS X Server suffered a major failure or someone with malicious intent wiped the hard drives.
The team writes on the web site:
“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.
But, clearly, we failed to take the steps to prevent this from happening. And for that we are very sorry.”
That’s six years worth of blogs wiped out in one fell swoop.
While every web and blog host (free or paid) will tell you that they have backup systems in place, rarely are they bulletproof. Deliberate attack, human error, hardware and software failures, and ISPs going out of business can all cause data to become corrupted and web sites to go offline – sometimes permanently.
Bloggers have to take some responsibility for their own blogs. If your blogging software allows you to export or backup data to local storage, make sure you do it on a regular basis and then back that up with the rest of your home computer systems (you do backup those, right?)
If you can’t backup at least your own posts and reader comments then it’s time to move to a web host and/or blogging platform where you can, before something like this happens and you lose all your work.
At very least, if you words are important to you, keep copies of the articles you’ve written on your PC and back them up. If blogging is your business and livelihood, you’ll do as much as you can to protect your content so, if the worst happens, you can be up and running on a new server with the minimum of downtime.
As for JournalSpace?
We’re considering releasing the journalspace source code to the open source community. We may also sell the journalspace domain and trademarks. Follow us on twitter at twitter.com/jsupgrades for news.
JournalSpace (via Associated Content)
