Disgruntled employee kills JournalSpace with data wipe | Hacker News Reader

Disgruntled employee kills JournalSpace with data wipe

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20 pointsthomas22 comments

If you read the original post, the supposed "disgruntled employee" worked for lagomorphics, not JournalSpace, and there's no evidence said employee was involved in the data loss, just conjecture by JournalSpace.

Flagged for being incorrect and not adding anything.

There don't seem to be new facts in this article, but it discards the "catastrophic OS flaw" theory and selects the "disgruntled employee" theory though it appears to conflate it with a historical disgruntled employee. It seems this is possibly shoddy reporting rather than new information.

Back at journalspace, I notice that if you buy their domain names they will throw in 6 months of free hosting on the same machines that destroyed their business. How generous.

The original journalspace announcement was discussed here, btw: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417762

If true, the disgruntled employee belongs in jail.

What I can't fathom is whether this person realized that there were any legal ramifications to doing a data wipe?

Did he think they'd just ignore the fact that he just killed their business?

Criminals often have poor impulse control, and let their emotions govern their actions without worrying very much about the consequences of their actions. This is particularly accentuated in those criminals who are also affected by psychopathy, for which the consequences of their actions towards other people are irrelevant.

How do you know the full story of it? A lot of startups in the valley now are totally dicking their employees out of equity and doing "firing layoffs" instead of really laying people off.

How do you know that journalspace wasn't being shady and screwing them in some kind of contract or negotiation gambit?

I can think of quite a few startups these days that deserve a similar fate to happen to them.

Journalspace sounds like one of an army of web 2.0 startups that aren't going to survive the coming years anyways and go broke. Maybe the founders can now focus on better projects. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise.

> How do you know that journalspace wasn't being shady and screwing them in some kind of contract or negotiation gambit?

It's irrelevant. If you have a dispute with someone and you feel he is treating you unfairly, it's your right to leave and/or sue him, not to burn his house down. If you burn his house down you are a criminal, no matter what he did to you.

I don't understand -- they seem to have been hosted by someone else; did the hosts not do backups or did the employee somehow delete those too?

Seems like at least two things went wrong.

It looks like automated backups is an add-on service, not part of their base hosting package.

As an aside, my hosting company accidentally deleted my backup share on their off-site SAN. I was not amused.

First rule of backups: trust nobody!

There's an infinite variety of problems that can exist with backups. Back in the early eighties I had to restore a file from a backup that was more than a year old, but couldn't read the tape (even though it was the same drive that created the backup). We called in our Field Engineer and he hooked an oscilloscope up to the tape drive and adjusted it until we were finally able to read the tape. It took most of a day.

Backups almost seem to be a running joke. Whenever we've done a restore of a db from backup the plan is basically "try to restore from the latest backup, if that doesn't work, try the next latest one and so on until you find one that works".

Remember that scene in The Matrix where Cypher kills Switch and Apoc by unplugging them. "Not like this."

Wow. What a way to go.

and here is the link to the guys who fked them over:

http://www.lagomorphics.com/

Its funny that they listed Journalspace under their "notable clients" section.

Interesting problem: how can you get to having backups if the person whose responsibility it would have been to take care of backups is the one who screws you over.

I guess this calls for technical CEOs...

The two-man rule?

First one who snitches on his coworker gets a bonus?

having no tape backup is a crime

I just started using tarsnap. Love it!!! It just works. The default behavior is exactly what I need.

I thought tape backup had died out (good riddance 40MB QIC tapes).

This article: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=267 from 2 years ago calculated that tape becomes practical when you have more than 10TB to backup, I imagine it is even worse now, that is you need to backup even more data before tape becomes the economy option.

Maybe there is some recent advance in tape technology?

Tape is a long way from being dead. We have tape libraries directly attached to our SAN and they backup 160 GB per tape. Because of data retention laws (we are a government agency) we need to archive backups for years, which we do off-site in a data vault. For SOHO use though, disk-to-disk backups generally are cheaper and faster, but it's still important to store backups off-site.

LTO4 holds 1.6TB (or 800GB if the data is already pre-compressed - ie JPG's or MP3's). Write speed of a theoritical 120Mb/sec (about the speed of gigabit ethernet). So unless you're running 10gigE these days - if you try and backup a server to tape through a network connection - the tape speed's probably not the bottleneck.

So slightly better than the QIC tapes.

I don't think anything compares cost wise (per TB) to a fitted out SL8500 / TS3500 or similar with LTO4..

Also - 10TB isn't that huge these days in terms of a backup environment..

All that being said - For anything under about 2TB/night I would be still be looking at getting away with just using disk (and replicating the backups to offsite).

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