Must have gone the same place two-day shipping went.
Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos
131–140 of 357 posts
Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm surprised, Amazon is well known of having the best in class customer support for their store (I mean: "Customer: My kindle broke, because I sat on it. Amazon: no worries, let me send you a replacement, no need to send back the old kindle" level of good support) - oh and human support, not google botocracy.
Have you tried getting through to a human recently on Amazon retail support? It's quite difficult. First you have to negotiate with a bot with an IQ and service level of an angry wasp, then you get filtered through to someone who usually can't help. So you have to try 2-3 times to get stuff sorted. The whole thing is designed to put people off and make it difficult to get problems resolved. I'm fairly good at being a…
It depends on "recently".
I contacted them (human, right away, speaking my language - I'm in EU and the store was in different country than mine) about a year or two ago where I had issue with my phone, and there was no issue to get my money back (Pixel 4 had issue with NFC not working correctly) - no "We will repair it", like any other retail store I used.
Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos
#133Just to add context - I do have backups, but they're spread across a myriad of different hard drives. I had used Amazon Photos to consolidate, and benefit from the facial recognition to be able to quickly locate pictures of family members quickly. I think that I'll give DigiKam another go, against the NAS loaded up. Thanks for the comments!
Not that it helps you now, but i also keep all our family photos in the cloud (iCloud in my case), but at the same time i have a small ARM machine at home that keeps a mirror of the iCloud data. That ARM machine also has the responsibility of making backups, local to a USB drive, as well as to another cloud. Not mirrors, but proper versioned backups (as in Restic, Borg, Arq, Duplicacy, Kopia, etc). I also maintain a…
> I don't bother archiving documents
Isn't that 2 or 3 orders of magnitude less space though?
I do understand where you're coming from for sure.
Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos
#134One of my worries that keeps me sleeplessly awake at nights sometimes is the possibility of solar flares wiping out storage/data -- at my bank, on my hard drive and what not. A sufficiently strong solar flare can essentially put us back a few centuries electronically, and a few millenia socially, instantly. Wonder if there are stress tests on cloud storage that account for this possibility by means of adequate insula…
> possibility of solar flares wiping out storage/data -- at my bank, on my hard drive and what not.
Oh, one solar flare can solve global inequality in an instant! There money in all bank account would dissapear and the recently rich would have to pull themselves up by the bootstraps!
Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos
#135This is why I use both Amazon Photos and Google Photos simultaneously on all my devices. If one of them screws up I've always got the other one. What I need to do though is get them all copied to my home backup server (the HTPC) on the regular...
> This is why I use both Amazon Photos and Google Photos simultaneously on all my devices. If one of them screws up I've always got the other one. That's insufficient. If one of then screws up, deletions will likely propagate to the other.
Exactly.
And if it’s a local backup, that local backup needs to be taken offline, to avoid the same issue if things get deleted in the cloud
Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos
#136Anyone have a good iCloud backup option? I finally "gave in" and stopped manually pulling photos off my iOS devices and subscribed to iCloud. However I'm worried I'll get screwed or mistakenly delete something.
iCloud doesn’t really back up photos. It’s more of a sync. If you’ll manually delete a photo from your phone, it’ll be deleted from iCloud too.
The conflation of sync and backup can actually be really dangerous. You don't want a primary backup to have the opportunity to delete files because they (apparently) have been deleted on the primary.
Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos
#137This is just a reminder to take a backup of your cloud photos and store it locally (or other cloud provider). For example, with Google Takeout you can get a ZIP file with all your photos and videos from Google Photos.
That makes no sense. If you have backups locally, why store them on the cloud?
Exactly, if cloud cannot be trusted I might as well buy a synology nas and drop at a family member's home.
Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos
#138It literally only has been 1 hour since OP posted that thread. I agree with all the points about having backups and/or using better service/self host etc., but IMO it's too early to conclude anything about this incident.
Knowing Amazon retail / services support, their data is gone and they'll be lucky if they raise anyone at all. If you pay $15k a month for AWS enterprise support, you will find someone who may or may not be able to help you within 6 months after misinterpreting the problem and having to raise your account manager and wave your hands around.
This has not been my experience. I pay 100$/mo for support and when I have had issues (had a RDS upgrade go really bad once) they have contacted me quickly to get details. Usually only 2-4 hours for an engineer to be on the issue.
Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos
#139My wife just purchased a 10tb ssd as a "backup" for Amazon Photos.
I think it's likely worth it considering the value of basically the history of our lives.
Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos
#140It literally only has been 1 hour since OP posted that thread. I agree with all the points about having backups and/or using better service/self host etc., but IMO it's too early to conclude anything about this incident.
So they might still get their photos back. 240,364 photos is a lot, and none are replaceable. It’s still a lot of stress.
In this case they do have backups, just not convenient ones