Back in the year of 2012, the U.S government raided Megaupload and shutdown the service after a long investigation. With the shutting down of Megaupload, 10.75 million legitimate files were sent to the graveyard, according to new research from Boston’s Northeastern University. This is an important revelation as the U.S. government claims Megaupload was a pirate site with seemingly few legitimate uses.

In order to fill the gap and to understand more about the legitimate uses of these websites, Boston University researchers along with colleagues from France and Australia, examined millions of files from 5 cyberlockers (FileFactory, Easy-share, Filesonic, Wupload and Megaupload).

Researchers extracted meta data from the site’s upload to find out whether or not files were legitimate. The researchers would then manually determine the legitimacy of the files based on random samples of 1,000 uploads per site.

In the case of Megaupload, researchers came to the conclusion that 31 percent of all uploaded content were infringing on copyright laws while 4.3 percent were legitimate files. So, of an estimated 250 million uploads, 10.75 million of that number were legitimate files, which contradicts the U.S government claims about Megaupload lacked use for legitimate uploads. (Although, it should be mentioned, if only 4.3 percent were legitimate then… yeah… you fill in the blanks.)

The remaining 65 percent is either unknown, or the researchers were unable to reach a consensus.

The fate of Megaupload should be a clear indication to Internet users that they should never put their trust in online storage. Always keep a backed up version of your files in local storage as anything is possible.

[via Torrent Freak, image via Hollywood Reporter]