RackForce accidentally deletes ten-year-old database

Managed hosting service provider RackForce has accidentally deleted one of its customer's decade-old databases, which contained more than 1.5 million forum posts.

Impalassform.com, which is a leading automotive forum and allowed users to share information on the Chevrolet Impala, has now lost around ten year's worth of data, according to Zack Kanter – who reported the incident to Web Host Industry Review.

Mr Kanter told the news provider: "It is truly a tragedy in the automotive community."

RackForce's general manager Randall Robinson said that the error was an extremely unusual and unfortunate event.

"The issue was caused by a miscommunication between the customer and one of our technical staff, which resulted in a data file being deleted," Robinson said.

He added: "We made every effort to recover the lost information; however, because the customer did not subscribe to any back up services with RackForce nor did they have any backups of their own, the lost data was unrecoverable."

According to MessageLabs, a large number of small and medium-sized businesses are putting themselves at risk by making data backup a low priority.

Written by Debra Hastings-Henry