Long-forgotten social network Myspace this week re-emerged from the doldrums after losing 12 years' worth of data.
The once-leading social network said content uploaded to its site from its inception in 2003 up until 2015 may no longer be accessible.
"As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace. We apologise for the inconvenience," the company said in a statement.
Before the advent of the likes of Facebook and Twitter, the once-mighty Myspace dominated the social media space before fading into obscurity. Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world from 2005 to 2009.
It offers an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos.
Myspace was acquired by News Corporation in July 2005 for $580 million, and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited Web site in the US.
In April 2008, Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors and was surpassed in the number of unique US visitors in May 2009, though Myspace generated $800 million in revenue during the 2008 fiscal year.
Since then, the number of Myspace users has declined steadily in spite of several redesigns.
"Unfortunately, the recent Myspace data loss of potentially millions of songs that were uploaded over a multi-year period serve as another cautionary tale to remind us that your data remains your responsibility," says Dave Russell, vice-president for enterprise strategy at Veeam.
"Public cloud and service providers are often focused on infrastructure, meaning servers, storage and networking, but make no claims as to the integrity or availability of data. If your data is important to you, you really need to ensure that proper availability is in place to protect it."
Rick Vanover, senior director of product strategy at Veeam, comments that the cloud and services within it are not immune to data loss.
"The industry is constantly given reminders of this, everything from headlines to terms of conditions of many services. What can be done to avoid data loss? Having control and multiple copies of data is the best way to avoid situations like this recent unfortunate milestone."
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