JournalSpace
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
JournalSpace was an online blogging community founded in 2002, owned by half-brothers Dylan and Holland Rhodes through their company Lagomorphics. Over nearly six years it built a community of bloggers and a significant repository of user data — blogs, journals and entries hosted on its servers. On December 18, 2008 the entire database was wiped by a disgruntled former IT employee; the mirrored drives simply cloned the deletion, and no backup existed, so the data was unrecoverable and the service shut down.
02 / JournalSpace FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors supported by the current evidence
JournalSpace's production database was overwritten in a malicious act by a disgruntled former employee, and the company had no usable backup.
The production database was maliciously overwritten and no usable backup existed.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
JournalSpace ceased operating after losing its production database.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
On December 18, 2008 the JournalSpace data server was wiped; administrators discovered the RAID mirror had cloned the deletion and no usable backup existed.
- 02
Drives were sent to DriveSavers on December 22, but the data was declared unrecoverable; 'the data was simply gone. Overwritten.'
- 03
The company announced 'after nearly six years, journalspace is no more,' released no further product, and listed the JournalSpace.com and .net domains for sale on eBay, pledging 15% of the sale price to Susan G. Komen for the Cure.