‘Heartbreaking’ data loss as TVCentral goes blank

[payattention]

Mumbrella article & Ventra IP's response.

Sad situation for both parties to be in. I don't think the site owner is being dramatic by comparing the loss of his data to the loss of his sister when it's a labour of love. I lost my BBS back in the 1990's and literally vomited as I didn't make a backup.

It'll be interesting to see how it proceeds. I still use Ventra IP for domains but moved hosts after Cheyne flippantly threatened to delete my hosting account after I got upset with one of his staff for not taking the time to read one of my support tickets.

 

[snoopy]

I still use Ventra IP for domains but moved hosts after Cheyne flippantly threatened to delete my hosting account after I got upset with one of his staff for not taking the time to read one of my support tickets.

Thanks for sharing, certainly doesn't inspire confidence joke or not, would get most people moving I think.

 

[sp@rky13]

Although I'm biased towards VentraIP, it is the responsibility of the client to keep backups.

 

[joe]

wow that sucks. Really, though, keep your own damn backups.

old matie's time would be far better spent scraping google cache and archive.org to recover what he can rather than faffing about with legal action

 

[acheeva]

Unfortunately we are sometimes guilty of being arrogant or overly brazen; particularly at times when we are trying to save a few bucks.

I had a large database migration from Access to SQL go bad a few years ago; thankfully my IT company had intervened beforehand and would not allow the upgrade to occur without their supervision.
I was not given a choice, because in their words "shit does happen" and they did not want to be on the receiving end of the blame game.

I believe that service providers do have a duty to stand up to arrogant clients in order to protect themselves. The easy way to do this is via their T&C's.

It would seems that all parties are losers in the TVCentral episode.

 

[Lucas]

If the data is important the website owner should keep an independent backup regardless of the hosting companies backup policy, and a backup of the backup and an extra tape backup for good measure. In my opinion this was not VentraIPs fault.

 

[DavidL]

Good response from VIP I think for what is an unfortunate series of events

 

[DamianLondon]

Unfortunate situation, but great lesson for all.

Getting wiped out can happen to anyone, whether it's failing to keep offsite backups or viruses/malware destroying a website.

If something is worth something to you (such as a website, car, house etc.), then ensure your asset is protected.

 

[FirstPageResults]

They should've moved off shared hosting ages ago by the sounds of it, very naive.

From the comments:

In essence TvCentral ran for a long time with two main people – myself and the previous owner. I was the content man and he was the technical expert and used to do all of that kind of thing and imagine he would have been doing back ups and the like. When I took over as the owner in November, he stepped away from the site completely. I had to find a new technical staff member and I did just a few days ago. I have no idea about backing up, coding and the like and relied on Ventra to provide that service until I found someone. My mistake it seems.

Pretty much sums it up. Who's backing up DNT btw?

 

[soj]

Unfortunate situation, but great lesson for all.

Getting wiped out can happen to anyone, whether it's failing to keep offsite backups or viruses/malware destroying a website.

If something is worth something to you (such as a website, car, house etc.), then ensure your asset is protected.

Excellent summation.

I obviously feel a great deal of sympathy for the guy (Aaron), but on the face of it, it seems Ventra did alert him to the steps that needed to be taken.

Regardless of rights or wrongs, it is human nature to look to blame someone (when a catastrophic loss like this occurs). Then parties get entrenched in order to fight their corner.

I sincerely hope that something can be recovered, and the parties look for constructive ways to make the best out of a bad situation.

But as Cheyne rightly said in the final paragraph of his press release:

"This situation is a timely reminder to anybody who hosts a website, that having a backup of your data is absolutely vital, and it should not be assumed
to be the responsibility of your web hosting provider unless you have a specific Service Level Agreement (SLA) which clearly outlines the backup policy
and routine, and you are satisfied with those policies and routines."

 

[soj]

Who's backing up DNT btw?

Hopefully some fellow in Box Hill.

 

[Oz.]

Hopefully some fellow in Box Hill.

One of my best friends lives in Box Hill, I'll check to see if he is backing it up for ya!

 

[Jonathan]

Seems like both parties screwed up.

The site owner was mad not to have kept any backups, and VentraIP certainly gave him fair warning in that department. Unless you specifically pay for the service, you shouldn't be expecting your host to do your backing up for you.

Nonetheless, shouldn't it be standard practice for the host to backup the client's site before performing something complex like a server migration?

I *do* keep backups, and I know that if a host told me they accidentally deleted my site doing a server migration and needed one of my backups to restore things, I would seriously question their technical competence.

I think the ultimate responsibility lies with the site owner, but as someone who has some sites hosted with VentraIP this whole thing makes me a little uneasy.

 

[Jonathan]

P.S: It seems like at least part of the site was cached by the wayback machine about 6 months ago, so maybe it's at least partially recoverable. http://web.archive.org/web/20110706113406/http://www.tvcentral.com.au/

 

[James]

P.S: It seems like at least part of the site was cached by the wayback machine about 6 months ago, so maybe it's at least partially recoverable. http://web.archive.org/web/20110706113406/http://www.tvcentral.com.au/

Wayback only indexes a limited number of pages, the site TV Central is around 25,000 pages.

 

[joe]

Wayback only indexes a limited number of pages, the site TV Central is around 25,000 pages.

~25k indexed in google but it looks like a lot of those are tag and category pages

they could probably still get a fair chunk of actual articles from search engine caches and wayback by omitting those kind of urls. They'd wanna get a wriggle on before the SE's start dropping those pages from the index

site:tvcentral.com.au +inurl:/articles/ returns about 2k, much more manageable.

looks like they had a fair bit of podcast content and some video stuff. Hopefully whoever edited them hung onto a copy

not much hope of getting user accounts back, but they could launch an impassioned appeal to get folks to sign-up again (and bring some friends along)

 

[Billy01]

How did I miss this? 150000-legal-threat

http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/busine...ed-by-150000-legal-threat-20120220-1tii5.html

 

[payattention]

Rabbit hole goes much deeper... http://xisexpose.blogspot.com.au/

 

[VentraIP]

Do we really need to re-hash this crap again? Really?

You may want to read http://forums.ventraip.com.au/showthread.php?t=2846 which addressed that rubbish two years ago.

 

[soj]

Rabbit hole goes much deeper... http://xisexpose.blogspot.com.au/

Personally, I don't think this blog revelation is any big deal. (And it's old).

It seems Cheyne has been very upfront about this. Here is a post on Ventra's own forum back in March 2010.

https://forums.ventraip.com.au/showthread.php?t=2846

As Henry Ford once said: "Failure is the opportunity to start again more intelligently".

I always treat people / companies as they treat me - and Ventra have treated me fine. Their hosting products and deals
are great imho. I think lots of people on here would agree with that.

And before you accuse me of bias because Ventra are a sponsor here, I always call a spade a spade. I still think Drop
has a far easier and better COR process.

As far as Aaron is concerned, I think it is a sad situation all round (as I said before). It is a shame it has degenerated to this.