Come to think of it I find this pretty much impossible to believe. Unless the data set was many, many terabytes of data, surely there would be some sort of copy of the database somewhere? Even the schema with some reference data...

That's entirely possible, but if the data is years old or simply reference data, what's the point? They just lost years worth of peoples' blogs (or whatever). That isn't really something that can be recovered from. Would you go back? Would you recommend it to a friend?

If I owned JournalSpace and only had a schema left, I'd want to give it another go, done properly. You still have the name, pagerank, domain name etc. Sure, your name is (rightly) dirt for a while but I'd still want to give it a go...

I just find it amazing that there was never a situation where someone said "I'd like to test this change on some live data before rolling it out" or "I'm about to make a change/upgrade, I better run a backup first"