An incredible amount of data exists on the Internet and many people wonder how long it will remain there. A current news article on the Quartz website looks at the massive loss of content that was recently experienced by the MySpace social media site, and how it relates to the regular loss of data that occurs on the Internet.
Through the years, millions of musicians worldwide have stored samples of their recorded music on the MySpace platform. In March 2019, it was announced that MySpace lost more than 50 million, pre-2016 audio music tracks, as well as all photos and videos from that time period.
MySpace is a free site that debuted in 2003. During the mid-2000s, it was the world’s largest social media site, and at one point the site received more visits than any other U.S. website.
The author of the Quartz article makes the point that anyone who had content stored on MySpace without an alternate backup has lost their work. The loss of files from the former social media giant serves as a cautionary tale regarding the choice of service providers.
Interestingly, it is pointed out that the lost content from MySpace was very important to the site’s users, but the users’ data, which is more valuable to the operators of the site, was probably saved.
A big problem that the Internet consistently faces is keeping intellectual property safe and accessible. Unfortunately, the only real way to keep content safe is to keep it inaccessible. If the content is inaccessible and nobody can utilize it, what would be the point of creating any content?
There are now some online resources that are dedicated to preserving older public web pages. One of these is the Internet Archive, where more than 450 billion web pages are stored.
Another useful data preservation resource is the Stanford University-based LOCKSS network. LOCKSS stands for Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. Although this network was originally designed to preserve scholarly publications, it now stores all types of digital content.
Read More: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/innovation-in-compliance-keeping-your-t-11618/
Dil Bole Oberoi
