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Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

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Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#141

Post by unxdfa »

krzyk wrote: post #132
unxdfa wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Last month here in UK. After a package was stolen from my doorstep but the delivery driver said it was handed to receptionist. We don't have a receptionist, or a reception!

I'm a "high hitter" customer. I have prime and spend a hell of a lot of money with amazon every year so they tend to do what you ask eventually. But if you're a new customer or low value one your customer experience will be very very different. I know several people buying 1-5 things a year who have been told to piss off.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#142

Post by ClumsyPilot »

ho_schi wrote: post #14

Sounds unfortunate. Hopefully just an error or the service can replace it by a snapshot. No local backup on a drive or memory-card? Local backups shall be stored in different locations (depends on importance) not reachable by network. The cloud is the server of someone else and not a backup.

> Local backups shall be stored in different locations (depends on importance) not reachable by network

This is basically you signing that we have failed as an industry.

No other industry expects it's users to operate with tbe diligence of a bank.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#143

Post by ClumsyPilot »

luckylion wrote: post #54
Nextgrid wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Local backups shall be stored in different locations (depends on importance) not reachable by network. The cloud is the server of someone else and not a backup. That's common knowledge among tech people but blaming the victim is not the solution here. These services are marketed as safe, reliable, and not needing backups (in fact sometimes they make it difficult to take backups, even more so for a non-technical use…

Nobody is blaming the victim, they're saying that you should have a backup outside of your cloud provider. I don't think people care enough about SLAs to pay a premium, until something happens to their data. But by then it's too late. The bold warning is cute, but have you seen cigarette packaging in Europe lately?

> I don't think people care enough about SLAs to pay a premium

Huh? People specifically pay for cloud to not lose their data. Before that my parents used to copy photos from laptop to laptop, and lose them when a hard disk failed.

Now if cloud loses your data, they might ask wtf am I paying for.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#144

Post by johnnyballgame »

josefresco wrote: post #79

Anyone 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.

Install iCloud app locally and sync them. Then backup your local folder to another device or cloud. Backblaze B2 is a great cloud option for raw storage.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#145

Post by jefftk »

unxdfa wrote: post #116
jefftk wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for code, git being distributed means that there's always multiple copies with typical workflows. For example, in addition to the copy on GitHub whoever pushed last should have a completely current copy. And everyone else working with the repo should have something pretty current.

We have 643 git repos. I'm not sure we could reconstruct all of those by going round 300 engineers' machines...

Sorry, yes, at that scale I agree backups are worth it.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#146

Post by onphonenow »

PaulHoule wrote: post #129
EdwardDiego wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be freaking the fuck out too, tbh. These days you tend to get better support from the megacorps if you tweet or post on HN, it can bypass the obligatory outsourced support layer.

It might be true about some other big tech companies but AMZN is exceptionally obstinate.

I’ve had good support experiences at amazon actually

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#147

Post by magicalhippo »

bayindirh wrote: post #32
vocatan wrote: post #27

Just 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!

Digikam is the bees knees in digital asset management. I manage my personal photo archive with that, and it punches way above its weight.

I tried it as a replacement for Picasa, but found it underwhelming.

It was slow processing the images, so took very long after adding new pictures to them turning up in searches.

One of the main attractions, searching geotagged images by location, wasn't smooth at all and quite clunky to use.

Tried it a few times last fall but gave up.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#148

Post by lom »

Trasmatta wrote: post #122
stepri wrote: post #16

This 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.

I hate how Google Photos seems to no longer have the ability to auto sync to your computer. When it was integrated more with Google Drive you could do that, and then my daily automated backups would pull them. That way I had them in Google Photos, my computer's hard drive, and my off-site backups, all automatically. Now my only option is to periodically do a manual Takeout, as far as I can tell.

You can get automatic takeouts from Google, might have to find a way to automatically download them when they send it to your email

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#149

Post by ghaff »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #137
worldsavior wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having a spare hard drive that you occasionally sync up and drop off at a family member's house in addition to other backup strategies is indeed a decent idea.

However, I'm guessing that--if you're anything like me--you get lazy about refreshing it and, if something happens, you realize it's been a year since you did a fresh backup.

A cloud provider backup (as opposed to sync) is a good belt-and-suspenders cheap insurance backstop to local backups that you hopefully never need.

I have local Time Machine and Synology NAS but I also pay Backblaze a nominal amount. Companies were paying Iron Mountain large sums of money before there was a cloud.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#150

Post by bilekas »

It's not clear from the question what the problem could have been, but I would be REALLY surprised if the app would be responsible for removing the photos in storage.

The app is just a front-end, deleting data (with Amazon photos and even S3) is not easy to do by accident without user input.

Is it just resynching the application (metrics updating) ? Super curious the issue.

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