TechCrunch recently reported that a disgruntled and clearly malicious ex-employee of blogging platform provider, JournalSpace, decided to overwrite the company’s main database resulting in a substantial loss of data for thousands of bloggers. Apparently this former IT person decided that RAID alone would be enough to handle the backup for its main database and then took advantage of the vulnerabilities that he created after he left.

Of course the people behind JournalSpace, which has since been taken over by new owners, learned a hard lesson and maybe that is to not rely on only one form of data protection.

I’m sure the thousands of bloggers who used JournalSpace to host their blogs assumed there would be adequate space on the platform’s servers to back up their entries.  For those who did not back-up their own data, it presents a painful reminder that you can’t rely on these platforms to protect your content. Lesson learned for all you bloggers out there, never assume a third party provider has adequate back-up or back-up procedures at all as this was not the case for JournalSpace. The new owners have since made the policy quite clear.

Had the bloggers using JournalSpace organized and tracked their posts in TrackVia, there would not have been a frantic rush to Google Cache in hopes of retrieving their content and comments.  Check your third party providers to make sure your data is being backed up.   If you’re curious, this could not have happened at TrackVia.  In addition to RAID mirroring in every server, we also store all data in duplicate on physically separate servers in real time, and from there we have a continuously running backup process.  That’s three different back-up strategies running simultaneously. 

Too bad JournalSpace did not look into an online databaselike TrackVia to back-up its data.

Reminder to all bloggers: back it up!

I’ve backed up this post in my TrackVia database.