An entire season of a kids TV programme was lost after a disgruntled former employee of the studio's ISP wiped all the video files.
Zodiac Island was in the can and all stored in 300GB of video files with the creator's ISP CyberLynk.
The series was wiped after CyberLynk fired Michael Jewson, who, in a fit of peak destroyed as many files as he could find.
One of the servers he cleaned was the CyberLynk FTP server which contained the WeR1's files including the entire season of "Zodiac Island" -- 6,480 files. The show's producers had been using the server for nearly a year as a drop box where contributors from the U.S., Manila, Beijing and Hong Kong could collaborate on episodes.
CyberLynk was supposed to have backed up the data, but CEO Adam Hobach told WeR1 that his company's backup procedure "had failed and/or was not properly instituted."
Thus two years of work was completely destroyed. Needless to say WeR1 is suing the ISP and Jewson.
"Zodiac Island" is broadcast on about 100 US TV stations. It tells of the adventures of animated characters and their real-life friends as they learn about "teamwork, sharing and how to be part of a loving community". We guess it is the sort of loving community that does not have one bloke getting miffed and deleting everything.
Apparently some data was retrieved but 65GB of the data was gone for good.
WeR1 said that the destroyed data includes fragments from each of the 14 episodes, it is now impossible to re-assemble any of the episodes in its entirety,WeR1 said.
Jewson has agreed to pay WeR1 $360,000 in damages, as part of a deal to reduce his sentence. The company doesn't believe he will be able to pay the full amount and wants cash from the ISP.
* EyeSee David Icke wishes to point out that although lizards are involved in the programme they are not from outer space and were mostly harmless. He would never advocate deleting lizards that are native to planet earth.
Could be interesting tho. Depending on how badly they want them, they could always download them via some torrent site? I bet someone out there is seeding them.
Of course, having got their files back, the natural course of action would then be to sue those who had saved their skin..
Fit of pique, perhaps.
Damn you Auto Correct!
If they had backed them up their would be no lawsuit and more or less, no story. Even though the ISP and/or the content providers got most of the files back, content is going to have to be recreated and thats going to cost the show money. Someone has to pay for it and that is rightfully the ISP that has been charging them fees to provide a service or at least charging them fees and not providing them service.
That tech needs jail time and a lot of it.
The sad thing is at 330GB of data that is already online, it would be very easy to do a second site online backup.
Very sorry for their loss.
The whole affair is really CyberLynk's fault on more than one level (how could the ex-employee still log on after a month of being fired??), although the guy is either a turd or he is very silly. If he's a turd, he should pay and if he's silly, he should do community work, as a sentence.