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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

#71

Post by buro9 »

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #12

Seems like a funny policy to not backup production paying customers photos & metadata. Think of all the photos, comments, followers, etc that just got nuked! Seems like they rely on RAID or having multiple copies of the data spread around for disaster recovery. Sure it protects you from a server/raid/hardware failure but when a user/admin does something dumb it can really hurt! Doing a quick google search turns up th…

Yup, sounds like it.

They need to learn the mantra: "Replication is not backup, DROP DATABASE replicates pretty well.".

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

#72

Post by dtc »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #56
theDoug wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I'd have sympathy for Flickr if this story didn't come up almost monthly in the last few years. Between this and the account deletions of those who spoke loudly over Flickr's other account deletions, more and more Flickr is becoming a hostile system. The lack of a retrieval system could be from a lack of Yahoo wishing to invest in upgrades to the platform in general. The last few years have seen few changes f…

I think that danger is very real. I used to be a Flickr Pro member but I've been taking fewer pictures the last few years (for several reasons) and can't justify the Pro account anymore. However, the side affect of that is that now some of my older pictures are less accessible and my old photo sets aren't browseable. At least to me this seems like a bad business plan for Flickr, especially amidst an abundance of rabi…

Could you point me to some of the rabid competition that might offer a similar pricing model?

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

#73

Post by InclinedPlane »

dtc wrote: post #72
InclinedPlane wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that danger is very real. I used to be a Flickr Pro member but I've been taking fewer pictures the last few years (for several reasons) and can't justify the Pro account anymore. However, the side affect of that is that now some of my older pictures are less accessible and my old photo sets aren't browseable. At least to me this seems like a bad business plan for Flickr, especially amidst an abundance of rabi…

Could you point me to some of the rabid competition that might offer a similar pricing model?

Flickr's main competition isn't with services that have feature parity with them, it's more with the growing list of free image sharing sites. Imgur, twitpic, facebook, picassa web, even dropbox. Flickr's value add is rapidly becoming smaller and smaller, which could very easily undermine their business model.

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

#74

Post by duke_sam »

This is pretty awful. I have some sympathy for the support staff though, if their tooling allows them to irreversibly delete someones account (and it's history) they need better tooling. The realisation that they just deleted someones 5 year old Pro account and 4,000 photos... oh shiiiiii

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

#75

Post by gnaffle »

Although this is a terrible mistake on Flickrs part, and it shouldn't have been possible to do this by accident, am I the only one that is happy that deleting a Flickr account really means _deleting_ it?

Most other services like Facebook, GMail are explicitly designed to keep your data forever, and if you don't want that, well, you should have thought of that before using the service. I would actually be happier and feel safer if we heard more complaints from Facebook users that accidentally deleted their account and couldn't get it back. It would be a clear sign that their system was designed with privacy and "data hygiene" in mind.

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

#76

Post by gnaffle »

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #12

Seems like a funny policy to not backup production paying customers photos & metadata. Think of all the photos, comments, followers, etc that just got nuked! Seems like they rely on RAID or having multiple copies of the data spread around for disaster recovery. Sure it protects you from a server/raid/hardware failure but when a user/admin does something dumb it can really hurt! Doing a quick google search turns up th…

It seems like a _very_ good policy from a privacy perspective, if I accidentally uploaded some pictures that I really didn't want online (easy to do with an upload tool pointed at a directory), then I'd feel much more assured if Flickr would tell me that they didn't keep any copies of my pictures floating around "just in case".

Of course, deleting a complete account without any means of rectifying it sounds like a very bad idea and shouldn't have been possible. At the very least there should have been red warning signs flashing when the support person deleted a pro account with 4K+ pictures in it.

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

#77

Post by gaius »

hrktb wrote: post #69
sdizdar wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is what I don't understand. They have multiple redundant copies in case of unlikely scenario of disaster, but they have no copies or protection in case of quite likely scenario of operator error. This seems backward to me. EDIT: I don't believe that Yahoo! Flickr does not have a way to recover these things. Or I'm completely wrong.

Reverting a full db should be straightforward (stop the db server and revert a dump). For a single account it's more of a pita. Retrieving all the datas associated with one account, put it in a format readable from the production environment and recommit all the changes while dealing with the potential errors and inconstencies seems quite a huge deal. Messing unrelated data in the process would also be a nightmare. O…

It's trivial in Oracle, just do a Flashback Query. You would just need to support that in whatever front end interface the customer support people use.

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

#79

Post by RuadhanMc »

4 year subscription to Flickr Pro? That's not even a year for every year of photos he has lost. I would think that if you deleted 5 years of a users photos the least you could do would be to give them a life time subscription to Pro and buy them the best damned camera available so that they can take new photos.

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

#80

Post by jasonlotito »

relix wrote: post #13

The article pointed out that a lot of services "deactivate" an account rather than delete it. I would suspect this common sense methodology is as obvious as hashing a password, but apparently, and unfortunately for the artist, it is not. That's the biggest point I took from this. Removing the wrong account can always happen, but actually wiping data instantly without an invisible "grace period", or retrieval from bac…

> I would suspect this common sense methodology is as obvious as hashing a password, but apparently, and unfortunately for the artist, it is not.

A few days ago we had a big thread on Undo in software development, and a lot of people were suggesting Undo is very very difficult to implement with little benefit to most users.

Then you have articles like this where people are shocked that undos weren't in place.

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