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Finnish blog blunder: disaster, no recovery

Nordic cloud burst

A Finnish blogging portal, Bloggen.fi has lost users' data from October 2009 to June 2010 because of an outage last week.

The word is that it had the main data and backup data on the same virtual server. That seems unnecessarily economical.

The outage (In Swedish: sorry) is blamed on spam, which our correspondent thinks is odd. We're told the stable door was closed, locked and bolted after the data had horsed out into the wide blue yonder - an autoloader tape system arrived on site after the failure, with hints that it was ordered in a panicky burst of removable backup enthusiasm after the data had gone missing.

Patrik Pada, digital media head at HSS Media which owns Bloggen.fi, said: "During the midsummer holiday weekend an unexpected amount of spam blog comments and newly registered spam blogs occurred. Our theory is that this led to a shortage (of disk space) and this in turn took down the entire virtual server."

"The problem is that the original and backup were on the same virtual server cluster so everything crashed at the same time. Tomorrow we shall install a new server which shall save all backups on different hardware and at different geographic locations. This (replacement) has been planned for a long time so it was very bad timing."

Rumour central in Finland thinks this long-time planning is horse manure as it doesn't take that much time to get a tape autoloader from a supplier.

We're told many Bloggen.fi users are leaving the site as, when it came back up they had to register and restart their blogs from scratch and, as our correspondent said: "are pissed off at this incompetence."

This was despite being offered ten free passes to HSS Media's electronic newspaper if they re-registered on the day the Bloggen.fi site was re-launched. ®

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