Following a data debacle, the blogging platform ceases to exist and the domain name is now up for sale. All this unfolded over the last 2 weeks when the ‘main database’ that held all key information (including the labor of love of many bloggers) was wiped out after it was unrecoverably written over – ostensibly by a disgruntled IT administrator. Techcrunch has the details.

Oh, and they hadn’t backed up their main (SQL Server) database – and they’ve been around for 6 years!!!

Reading about the Journalspace debacle brought back memories of a similar story I’d read about 2 years ago. I revisited that today and, very interestingly, found out that a data disaster can sometimes be a good thing – as Couchsurfing found out, much to its delight…

From Wikipedia’s entry on them: The CouchSurfing Project is a free, Internet-based, international hospitality service, and it is currently the largest hospitality exchange network. The project was commenced in 2003 and formally launched on Jan 1, 2004.

Their member growth (also from Wikipedia):

End of 2004: 6,000 members
End of 2005: 45,000 members
October 2008: 780,000 members

So what happened between 2005 & 2008, that drove such spectacular growth?

Nothing much! They lost their main database (MySQL Server this time) in June 2006…and no prizes for guessing – they hadn’t appropriately backed it up!

Due to the volume of critical data that had been lost, Couchsurfing’s founder, Casey Fenton was of the opinion that the project could not be resurrected and on June 29, 2006 he issued an email to the membership announcing that “It is with a heavy heart that I face the truth of this situation. CouchSurfing as we knew it doesn’t exist anymore.”

Then something interesting happened…

Fenton’s email was met with vocal opposition to the termination of the project and considerable support for its recreation.

“CouchSurfing 2.0″ was announced early in July 2006, with the intent to be operational within 10 days. The initial implementation of CouchSurfing 2.0 actually launched after only four days.

Since the relaunch the project received a lot of international media coverage, and grew to reach over 780,000 members

Couchsurfing even has a page dedicated to their Phoenix-esque ‘rising up from the ashes’ story.

Though it worked out well for Couchsurfing (primarily since their data could be largely recreated), not backing up your primary data (especially when your whole company is built around it) is foolish, by any yardstick!

Don’t hope for a happy ending like Couchsurfing; backup your data today (all service providers reading this – please do ensure that you don’t forget to back yourselves up)!

Shameless plug: StoreGrid backs up SQL Server, MySQL, and lots lots more!

The above post was written by Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.