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Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back

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Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back

#21

Post by gst »

What a coincidence. My Flickr pro account expires on Feb. 15 and today I've decided to move away from Flickr and not renew my account.

What I've done in the short term is to use FlickrTouchr (https://github.com/tominsam/flickrtouchr) to retrieve my ~7 GB of photos from Flickr and upload them to Dropbox. The Dropbox gallery feature works quite well and has the advantage that you can easily backup/modify the underlying files.

In the long term I'd like to move the pictures to my own server (allowing me to use my own domain, etc.) and hack together a simple frontend similar to Dropbox' gallery.

If you decide to move away from a Flickr pro account (and if you also have non-public photos on your account) don't forget that after your account is switched back to a normal account you can only access the 200 most recent photos. So if you want to delete your photos from Flickr it's best to do so before the pro account expires.

Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back

#22

Post by scott_s »

hkuo wrote: post #4
privacyguru wrote: post #2

Would someone really trust Yahoo/Flickr to all their images and not have backups? Hopefully they didn't really care much about the images, else they should have copies elsewhere.

I would imagine it's not so much about the loss of the photos as much as the loss of the social aspects of those 5 years, the comments made, the photos favorited, collections followed. Moreover, there's the uploading which would be a monumental effort to redo, including titles and captions.

Not only is what you said correct, it's from the second sentence of the article: Mirco Wilhelm has the original files saved elsewhere, but the photos from his extensive Flickr collection had been linked to from all over the web, including the official Flickr blog.

I am forced to conclude that few read the article, since most of the comments have focused on the - erroneous - idea that he depended on Flickr to store his data and had no backups.

Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back

#23

Post by lwhi »

Mz wrote: post #19
lwhi wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree - I've recently learned of the importance of diversification first hand. However, I'd argue the ability to take legal action, would actually encourage service providers to diversify their own backup strategies and procedures. If a mistake becomes too costly to consider - I think less mistakes would be likely to occur.

If a mistake becomes too costly to consider - I think less mistakes would be likely to occur. This conclusion assumes that the people running the business are capable of resolving such issues. If they are not, then all it does is put people out of business. Not everyone grows and adapts when faced with such pressures. Some of them just go extinct.

"This conclusion assumes that the people running the business are capable of resolving such issues. If they are not, then all it does is put people out of business."

If a company can't be relied upon to look after my data - I want them to go out of business.

Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back

#24

Post by gst »

lwhi wrote: post #18
iwwr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single service, even a cloud, is still a single point of failure. Diversify your backup strategies. Indemnification is likely going to push prices up further, making cloud non-competitive compared to traditional storage. Still, I feel a lot of old technology is merely being relabeled. Today everything that stores data remotely is called a 'cloud'. We may yet see small NAS units relabeled as 'private micro-clouds".

I agree - I've recently learned of the importance of diversification first hand. However, I'd argue the ability to take legal action, would actually encourage service providers to diversify their own backup strategies and procedures. If a mistake becomes too costly to consider - I think less mistakes would be likely to occur.

Which would also make the products much more expensive.

And I have a feeling that this money does not necessarily go into making the product more reliable, but that it is used to buy a better insurance.

Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back

#25

Post by electromagnetic »

iwwr wrote: post #17
lwhi wrote: post #7

I think this is a huge problem with all cloud services. As we start to rely on cloud providers to look after our data, we need to either become more educated (and proficient) by creating regular backups ourselves (which kind of makes the idea of managed cloud services defunct imo), or be in a position where we can individually sue for damages incurred by negligence on the part of the service company in question. So m…

A single service, even a cloud, is still a single point of failure. Diversify your backup strategies. Indemnification is likely going to push prices up further, making cloud non-competitive compared to traditional storage. Still, I feel a lot of old technology is merely being relabeled. Today everything that stores data remotely is called a 'cloud'. We may yet see small NAS units relabeled as 'private micro-clouds".

I don't get how in todays day and age the person lost their own copies of their photos. All the photographs I have taken with my current camera are still on the memory stick, on my hard drive and in the cloud. Why? Because data storage is massive compared to your average cameras photo quality.

My camera holds about 2,000 pictures on the highest compression setting on an 8GB card. It's not like that amount of data is precious. I have hundreds of movies and thousands of TV episodes stored, why is it that this person couldn't keep their photos?

I hear a lot of stories like this, and being a writer I can only think "are they stupid?" Until recently everything I'd ever written, if stored in RTF and rar'd would still fit on a floppy disk. I think I've expanded to two.

I now have a flash drive for storage. However my basic method is to simply download and rar all my files from Docs, email it to myself through gmail and load it onto the USB drive. It leaves me backed up in 3 places and the original copy.

Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back

#26

Post by chaz »

lwhi wrote: post #7

I think this is a huge problem with all cloud services. As we start to rely on cloud providers to look after our data, we need to either become more educated (and proficient) by creating regular backups ourselves (which kind of makes the idea of managed cloud services defunct imo), or be in a position where we can individually sue for damages incurred by negligence on the part of the service company in question. So m…

Consequential damages aren't covered in these services' terms of use because nobody can afford to pay for them. Should Amazon be liable for Netflix's profits on EC2? If so, Netflix isn't paying Amazon nearly enough money.

Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back

#27

Post by [deleted] »

electromagnetic wrote: post #25
iwwr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single service, even a cloud, is still a single point of failure. Diversify your backup strategies. Indemnification is likely going to push prices up further, making cloud non-competitive compared to traditional storage. Still, I feel a lot of old technology is merely being relabeled. Today everything that stores data remotely is called a 'cloud'. We may yet see small NAS units relabeled as 'private micro-clouds".

I don't get how in todays day and age the person lost their own copies of their photos. All the photographs I have taken with my current camera are still on the memory stick, on my hard drive and in the cloud. Why? Because data storage is massive compared to your average cameras photo quality. My camera holds about 2,000 pictures on the highest compression setting on an 8GB card. It's not like that amount of data is…

[deleted]

Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back

#28

Post by kscaldef »

electromagnetic wrote: post #25
iwwr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single service, even a cloud, is still a single point of failure. Diversify your backup strategies. Indemnification is likely going to push prices up further, making cloud non-competitive compared to traditional storage. Still, I feel a lot of old technology is merely being relabeled. Today everything that stores data remotely is called a 'cloud'. We may yet see small NAS units relabeled as 'private micro-clouds".

I don't get how in todays day and age the person lost their own copies of their photos. All the photographs I have taken with my current camera are still on the memory stick, on my hard drive and in the cloud. Why? Because data storage is massive compared to your average cameras photo quality. My camera holds about 2,000 pictures on the highest compression setting on an 8GB card. It's not like that amount of data is…

TFA: "Mirco Wilhelm has the original files saved elsewhere, but the photos from his extensive Flickr collection had been linked to from all over the web, including the official Flickr blog. Those links will now point to deadspace. Additionally, the followers he had accumulated, tags, photo captions and copyright information have been wiped out and may not be restored"

Beyond that, I have well over 2000 photos in my photo library, and I'm by no means a serious photographer. A professional might take several hundred photos in a single day. (Not all will be useable or worth publishing, but the idea that you might just never delete any photos off your memory card just doesn't work for a lot of people.)

Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back

#29

Post by Mz »

lwhi wrote: post #23
Mz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a mistake becomes too costly to consider - I think less mistakes would be likely to occur. This conclusion assumes that the people running the business are capable of resolving such issues. If they are not, then all it does is put people out of business. Not everyone grows and adapts when faced with such pressures. Some of them just go extinct.

" This conclusion assumes that the people running the business are capable of resolving such issues. If they are not, then all it does is put people out of business. " If a company can't be relied upon to look after my data - I want them to go out of business.

Unfortunately, recent years have given me the impression that if you set the bar too high, there will be so many failures that you won't have any services to turn to. That's my concern. I wish that weren't my concern and that I could heartily and unhesitatingly agree with you.

Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back

#30

Post by mechanical_fish »

there wrote: post #11
jamesjyu wrote: post #6

Time for backupify.com?

anyone know of anything like that for downloading the data locally? backing up data in the cloud to another place in the cloud just seems stupid. i've seen some flickr-specific backup scripts that just dump all of the images to a directory, but they don't preserve titles, dates, sets, collections, tags, etc.

backing up data in the cloud to another place in the cloud just seems stupid

Why?

The difference between backing up your Flickr data to an encrypted drive at, say, Amazon and backing it up to an encrypted drive under your bed is: Amazon has better physical security, and far better redundancy, because (assuming you use S3) the "drive" you save it on there is actually a replicated data store that spans multiple regions and datacenters.

The point of backups is to provide redundant storage that is relatively uncorrelated to the original. Once you move the data to different disks at a different company in (if you like) a different country, you've done a lot to solve that problem.

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