MegaUpload: data recovery not going well

The US government has refused a solution put forward by MegaUpload’s lawyer which would have allowed users to recover their personal information before it is deleted from servers in the coming weeks.

The American lawyer representing MegaUpload hasn’t managed to obtain what he was looking for from US authorities. To prepare the defence of the file host and direct download portal which was shut down in January, Ira Rothken requested that a million dollars be unblocked.

This small sum (when considered among all of MegaUpload's seized funds) would allow for MegaUpload to purchase the servers from Carpathia Hosting used to host users data in the United States and Canada. The US government has flatly refused this deal.

This was a difficult decision for Ira Rothken to accept, with her clearly displaying MegaUpload’s frustration. Not just looking at MegaUpload’s defence, recovering this data would have allowed the services users to recover their legal files that had been stored online.

Through this investigation, US authorities indicated that they have taken copies of certain information, believing that Carpathia Hosting can now delete the rest of the close to 25 million GB of MegaUpload’s data from the servers. This concerns close to 66.6 million users.

According to Carparthia Hosting, maintaining the servers costs them 9 000 dollars per day. A hearing will be conducted in mid-April and if no solution is found to the problem, Carparthia Hosting will start the big clean up.

MegaUpload isn’t the only party looking to recover their information in this affair. This is also the case for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who is thinking of affected users and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) who would like to use the information in future law suits. After this, in addition to ValCom, the independent music label, is Microhits who would also like to start legal action against the download site.