When Megaupload was raided early 2012, the U.S. Government seized 1,103 servers at Carpathia’s hosting facility in the United States.
Well over two years have passed since and still it remains uncertain if former users will ever be able to retrieve their files.
A reporter who used Megaupload to store work-related files did take legal steps to secure his files. However, despite six requests asking the court to find a solution for the return of his data, there is still no progress.
Hosting provider Carpathia previously estimated that it cost them $9,000 a day to keep the hardware in storage. The company even threatened that without compensation, it could have no other option than to wipe the data. This is also what Dutch hosting company Leaseweb did to the hundreds of Megaupload servers it had stored.
The bulk of Megaupload’s data is stored at Carpathia though, and to learn whether those servers remain intact TF reached out to the hosting company for a status update. Unfortunately, our repeated requests remained unanswered.
Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken was willing to provide some insight into the issue, and says that according to the information they have the servers remain in storage. Not at the original location, but in a warehouse of the hosting company in Virginia.
“Our understanding is that the Megaupload servers previously hosted at Carpathia are stacked in a disconnected state in a secure Carpathia facility in Virginia,” Rothken tells TF.
The U.S. Government is no longer claiming the Megaupload servers as they have copied all crucial data. However, the MPAA and the Department of Justice previously objected to a deal between Carpathia and Megaupload, where the latter would buy their own servers back.
This effort was stopped because the U.S. didn’t want Kim Dotcom to have access to the files. Hoping to get out of this stalemate the Court then suggested that all affected parties should get together and come up with a solution, thus far without success.
“In separate written requests in the past year both Carpathia and Megaupload have asked Magistrate Judge Anderson – who was appointed by Judge O’Grady to mediate the cloud storage server data issue – to preside over follow-up negotiations on data preservation and consumer access,” Rothken tells TF.
“The US DOJ has shown little interest in such negotiations and the Judge has not been inclined to set any additional meetings,” he adds.
In other words, there are no signs that former Megaupload users will get their files back in the near future. The question now is for how long hosting provider Carpathia will keep the servers in storage.
If Carpathia follows the example of Leaseweb and destroys the data, Megaupload’s business will be wiped for good before the criminal proceedings get into the meat of the matter. Perhaps that’s what the U.S. planned all along?
