Australian podcast company The Podcast Network crashed over the weekend as a hard drive failure and lack of redundancy, taking its podcasts offline and destroying show archives. 

According to The Podcast Network, “On Saturday Dec 20, the hard drive on TPN’s server suddenly died. We are in the process of restoring and re-building all of our sites and will have all of the shows back online asap.”

Since the crash, TPN’s put new hardware in place is trying to get things back online:

We recently outgrew the service we were using to backup the architecture and media files (we have over 500Gb of media files) and this crash happened before I managed to get a bigger backup drive configured. It’s always the way. As a result we’ve lost the old media files, so we’ll be getting the hosts to re-upload as many as possible. In addition, we’ll be providing an FTP drop box for the audience to send us any files they have that we don’t. And I’m also hoping we’ll be able to find a data forensic service that can pull stuff from our old dead drive. So I think we’ll be okay. It’ll probably take us a week to get all of the current shows back up and running.

The year has been a hard one for TPN and its podcasters. Besides ending the year with a crash, the network’s site was hacked earlier in the year.