Data Recovery Digest

With sites like Facebook and LinkedIn dominating the social media landscape, MySpace is all but an afterthought. Although it's nearly faded into obscurity at this point, MySpace has made its way back into the top headlines – for all the wrong reasons.

Deleting History

Remember the MySpace music player that we all had on our profiles? They were the ones that let us create miniature playlists of some of our favorite – and sometimes rare – tracks; and they were one of the features that Facebook has yet to copy. Well it seems that most of those songs have been accidentally deleted alongside every photo and video that was uploaded to the site prior to 2016. The culprit is said to be a botched server migration.

An official statement released by MySpace said: "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 apologize for the inconvenience."

Online opinions concerning the matter are mixed. While some view it as an utter catastrophe, others view it as moot. Since MySpace's user base has dwindled almost to the point of non-existence, most of the music remained dormant on their servers for years. However, since some of these tracks only exist on MySpace, the music might have been lost for good.

A Light at the End of the Tunnel

Thankfully, at least in the case of the music, the Internet Archive has stepped up to release an extensive catalog of nearly 500,000 songs. Although it comprises less than one percent of the approximate 50 million lost songs, it's certainly a positive note amidst this catastrophe.

While the exact source of the music files has not been named, credit is being given to an "anonymous academic group." The team was apparently studying and researching music networks while MySpace was still popular – and they were quick to respond after hearing the recent news.

A Twitter post from Jason Scott, digital historian and archivist, spoke excitedly about the release by writing: ''"ANNOUNCING THE MYSPACE MUSIC DRAGON HOARD, a 450,000 song collection of mp3s from 2008-2010 on MySpace, gathered before they were all 'deleted' by mistake."''

Feeling Nostalgic

To complement the massive database, the Internet Archive has provided its own database crawler, or searcher, dubbed Hobbit. While it currently takes some time to complete a search, the software is constantly being optimized and is expected to be released as an open source platform at some point in the future.

Additionally, programmers with the Internet Archive have created a handy little music player – designed to resemble the old MySpace player – for users who wish to stream any of these songs. It's a nice throwback that provides a touch of nostalgia while preserving digital music for generations to come.

For more information on the Internet Archive, including details on how to access their newest repository of music, please visit their official site at {{https://archive.org/|archive.org}}.