Data Loss Dooms Blog Hosting Service

The blog hosting service Journalspace is shutting down after all its user data was lost. Rather than backing up its data at another location, Journalspace mirrored the data on a separate drive on the same server. When the data on both drives went missing, the service apparently had no backups it could use to restore the data.

"There was no hardware failure," reads the notice to users. "Both drives are operating fine. The data was simply gone. Overwritten. ... Clearly, we failed to take the steps to prevent this from happening. And for that we are very sorry. So, after nearly six years, journalspace is no more."

The site had a rank of 106,000 on Alexa, suggesting some meaningful traffic. Obviously, a cautionary tale about back and recovery practices. See Slashdot for more discussion.