Remember MySpace? The social network that was dominant before Facebook? They made news last month due to (somehow) losing all the music ever uploaded to the site from 2003 to 2015, apparently during a routine server migration. Yep, all that data just gone, no proper backups, no real recovery or redundancy plan, no nothing.
Yeah, that’s pretty crazy, especially considering that the site changed focus in the early 2010’s to being a music based social network! While there are groups out there who archive most everything who have collections of music from the service at various times (thus some unique tracks which only existed on the service and nowhere else may well be saved) it’s still quite the hilarious failure.
You know what wasn’t lost, however? Your account, and most of the content you uploaded to it.
Contrary to popular belief, when MySpace changed their design and focus in early 2010, old accounts weren’t deleted. I’ve actually wanted to write about this ages ago – literally years, but never got around to it, as every time someone on Facebook would mention MySpace someone would say something like “glad they deleted all the old accounts” and the like. Yes, many people think that when this happened the company just hit the reset button and started fresh. That was hardly the case.
Instead they went through a change which required you to log in and “update” your account, and then that was that. Things were otherwise mostly unchanged
I know this, as my old account was upgraded back then — I wanted to see what the “new” design was like (I wasn’t impressed, and it has changed quite a bit since then) and saw that everyone’s old accounts were still there.
In fact, I’m logged in right now, seeing all my old “friends,” my same “top 8” (which amazingly is still a thing) and the vast majority of photos and the like are still around.
It looks like blogs were long ago nuked. Videos uploaded still exist, although I can’t seem to get mine to play. Photos, however, are still there for the most part, with only a few seeming to have issues loading – I’d say 9 out of 10 pictures are still on there, and considering how most who used MySpace were teenagers, especially during the “emo” phase of the mid to late 2000’s this means, as the article title suggests that yes, your old MySpace account, and all your teenage emo phase pictures, still exist on there.
If you still remember your login information, or at least still have access to that email address, maybe try logging in or resetting the password and see what you can find. You may be surprised.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace
On a side note, I actually always liked how MySpace did things back in the 2005-2009 days. The general feel was much better than Facebook, at least what Facebook became, but then again social media has generally become worse and worse as time has passed… but that’s another story for another time.