Photo loss blogger to Flickr: You're f*cking kidding Yahoo!-owned photo-sharing site Flickr has mistakenly deleted 4,000 photos belonging to a photoblogger, who opined that Yahoo! surely must be "fucking kidding". Mirco Wilhelm, an IT Architect at T-Systems Schweiz, has used Flickr to store and share his photos for five years. He reported a user account to Flickr that contained …
Only a moron would make a comment without checking the facts. The guy in question has local backups. I know of no serious photographer who only keeps photos online. Also, if you've ever tried uploading thousands of photos, organising them into sets and collections and the like, then you also wouldn't make moronic comments like it would take a couple of days. Quite apart from uploading of the order of 1GB of data, the online work involved is enormous.
Then there are all the comments which will have been lost, the links that will fail from other sites/ In all, it's weeks of work to sort this out, not a couple of days. I've got about 8,000 photos on Flickr, all carefully organised, and I'd be somewhat annoyed to have to reinvest all the time required to reorganise them.
However, the one thing I can see is that Flickr is a cheap service, and there's a limit to what you can expect at the price, but it's not rocket science to have a "soft" delete service that leaves files where they are for several months after an account is removed so it can be rapidly reinstated.
Moron's what are the ones...? Anyway, we learn a few things from this:
1. If the metadata is so important, maintain this yourself. Decent photo management software should be able to handle tags at the very least, along with all the bundled metadata. The online service should be a mirror of your own data, apart perhaps from a small number of things.
2. If the contact information is so important, maintain this yourself. Don't delegate your social network to a service that may just decide to revoke it.
3. If the comments are so important... Well, most comments on Flickr seem to be people posting "Your picture is invited to be part of the 100000001 best scenery pictures EVAR!" next to early- to mid-1990s animated GIFs (or something resembling the artistic result) followed by a herd of like-"minded" people, so perhaps there isn't such a loss there for most users.
Ultimately, he should back-up his own files, not rely on the cloud. The same goes for ISPs that lose data websites or anything else. If you don't have a CD, external HD or other form of backup for data that you own and value, you're no better than someone who goes out leaving windows open for the burglars and then moans that the insurance company only want to go so far in covering your losses.
However... Where is Flickr's backup? Do they seriously have no backups that would at least restore the majority of the photos from such an old account? What do they do when a HD fails? What contingency is there for fires or other incidents? No backups, no shadows, no protection for their users' data, or even their own?!
Try clicking on the funny coloured text - these magically transport you to other web pages (without you having to remember and type in the long piece into your browser's address bar!).
Apparently this sort of thing is quite common on what the younger generation call the interwebz and allows one to navigate from page to page with ease, finding out all sorts of useful information (or pictures of Paris) in the process.
"There seems little chance that Wilhelm will be able to retrieve his photos".
True in the sense they are no longer on Flickr, but irrelevant as he has no need to retrieve them as he appears to have local backup according to his blog post.
And thanks to that one line we will see many comments along the lines of "should have had a backup", "is this guy an idiot?", yadda, yadda, yadda.
... flickr has some way to restore data - maybe only for paid accounts. The L3 support guy handling the case probably doesn't know or has no access to do that. He doesn't want to escalate it to higher level as it would expose his fault (he didn't count on blogger publishing his mail and el reg). He wants/wanted to get away with an apology.
Paris, coz her tapes were backed up.
I'm amazed that someone at Flickr was so quick to actually delete the data.
I would have thought they would have a procedure whereby they would be retained for x number days before being finally purged from the system.
But at the same time this guy should be happy enough that he's got 4 years of pro out of them. Yeah it was human error and they've admitted a mistake but I'm sure by the T&Cs he's signed up to they don't guarantee the availability of the data.
$12 is plenty to pay for a bit of disk space and bandwidth. It ought to be enough for them to provide a system which can recover an account a short while after they have accidentally deleted it.
I am actually surpised they charge at all.
Surely this incident will cost them more in lost custom than it could possibly have cost to put in a better system in the first place.
... before making comments.
1) He states he works in IT - is fully computer aware (he works in IT) - "In my day job I actually work as an IT Architect. I do designs on complex infrastructures, delivery processes and related stuff."
2) He does have back-ups of photographs - as has been said in other comments it's the years of comments, links etc. that he cannot re-build so quickly.
But, of course, the answer is easy as others have pointed out. Yahoo/Flickr just restore his profile /account the last back-up (presumably the previous day). If they aren't taking daily backups of all accounts and keeping at least six months worth then they cannot be taken seriously and should be avoided like the plague.
As someone else mentioned - multiple redundant backups...... Way to go...
So the mega FAIL for Flickr.
Personally I would never ever commit anything I rely on to the "cloud" UNLESS it provides one or more copies on a local computer under my control (Dropbox being a case in point).
... but unless I missed something Flickr has never been punted as a managed professional solution aimed at enterprise (or even business level) users. For the price they charge, you probably shouldn't expect a minimum SLA (probably not even well-trained staff unfortunately) - hell, SagePay don't even seem to have a minimum SLA and they're a card processing outfit.
To be honest, I'd be totally farked off if I was in that guy's position - I'd probably write my own system, host it with a cheap hosting outfit and run off nightly backups on a cron job. It wouldn't have quite the community aspect of Flickr but you could use something like OpenID for user authentication I suppose so people wouldn't be just signing up for your site.
...when Mystique was fighting with Wolverine and both were telling the other X-men: I'm the real Wolverine!
So, uhm, which one am I supposed to delete, this guy's account or this other guy's account which are surely identical enough to each other??!
I run my own gallery, with roughly 5000 pics totaling ~2 Gbytes of space. I've had to change hosting providers twice in the past couple years, and each time I've had to either re-upload the entirety of the pictures or so some really stupid shenanigans to get things back to normal. Invariably, the URLs to each image get munged.
I call this method "force foiling people hotlinking my images and stealing my bandwidth"
Is he saying that he had 4000 photos worth showing to the world? Probably a handful are good enough for display.
The main problem with these photo sites is that users stick up every picture they have. Thanks to digital photography we can all shoot off a run of, let's say portrait shots, in which the subject moves a fraction of a millimitre in each one but some think they must post all of them.
I haven't seen this chaps flickr pages so I'm only assuming most of it is dross but I'd be happy to bet a fair amount on it.
As other posters have pointed out a conventional restore of the system the size of flickr for the sake of one account wouldn't be a particularly good solution. Clearly they should have developed their site to allow for 'soft' deletes (ie data still live but hidden - instantaneous recovery in the case of errors) in the first instance followed by archiving (still allowing a relatively swift recovery from a seperate data store) and only after some time 'hard' delete (when you're reliant on backups for recovery).
As other posters have intimated there's no guarantee that software 'in the cloud' is any better written, configured or administered than it is anywhere else.
I don't use Flikr but I do have a lot of photos online. They're in www.mydomain.com/photos/<various folders>
If my hoster ever screwed up or I changed, so long as I kept the domain active surely it would be very easy to restore the pictures and the links out there across the world wouldn't be broken?
Hear, hear.
I use WordPress to run my blog, but run it out of my own domain. Granted, I found configuring a WP theme to run a cartoon blog a world-class pain in the ass -- even when using a pre-made theme designed for posting comics -- and I had to fight the urge to blow it off and use Blogger, even though it was far easier to set up and tweak a theme, because it was important to me that I be able to host my own blog in my own domain space, safe from being fucked with by WordPress and Google.
Besides, I've always heard that flying in the clouds is dangerous.
I've read all the comments on here and I was thinking why the hell didn't this guy have his own domain name and web hosting with whatever gallery software he wanted to run, hosting company goes belly up and upload it to a new host, no big problem.
Maybe acid rain is back, damn those clouds! they took our jobs!
Yes, we all keep our data in multiple places so that if we lose one, we still have a copy. But this incident proves it is not just the data that is important, but the context of it too.
So all the links, comments, friends, etc, suddenly become part of the data. If it's important, then you should back it up.
But how? How do you backup not just your own, but everyone else's Facebook, Twitter, El Reg, comments, wikipedia content, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc
If you're paying for something, then you can negotiate/expect a certain level of service (T&Cs). If it's free, just how do you backup the Internet?
Before you choose to write some tyrannical reply, I'm simply pointing out the problem - I'm not criticising any person or company. And it ain't an easy one to fix!
"Houston, we have a problem!"
1 "Haha, he doesn't have a backup"
2 "You can't read. He does have a backup"
3 "Easy, he restores from his backup"
4 "It's not the photos, it's the metadata."
5 (implict "So he *doesn't* have a backup.")
6 GOTO 1
Executive-level Summary: Online service doesn't care about your data as much as you do. Care for things your own self.
What Executives will actually take away from this point: Online services are inexpensive places to store things!
Surely the issue here isn't whether Flickr has/uses a suitable backup architecture for all of its content, that's a moot point. You can have all the storage you like and run it every 10 minutes if you want, but without the correct procedures and checks to manage that process it isn't worth the ink on this screen.
The most worrying fact here is that the procedures broke down seemingly so easily. That is what cloud users should be concerned with, not what primary and redundant hardware exists, but what management process exists to use it properly.
A bad workman blames his tools. A complete tool hires bad workmen.
by deleting the account and then not being able to recover the images on the account they have proved that they truly do delete data.
if they had deleted the account and then been able to retrieve the images I am sure there would have been howls on here that flickr was keeping data when they should have deleted it.
while it is unfortunate that this has happened to the blogger (wrong account deleted) it does show that flickr is following best practice with regards to data retention and deleting it as soon as it is no longer required.
I would have thought they should have a method of blocking the account first though (for a fixed period of say 28 days) before wiping it (even if its only to prevent this situation)
Even if a Flickr account gave a user the ability to rsync a binary dump of the whole account if this is in a proprietary storage format which works only in Flickr that wouldn't be much use for someone wanting to move their data elsewhere, links, comments and all.
Proprietary services using monopoly website providers on the cloud are the ultimate lock in. Open standards for how to store, link and format data which anyone can implement are the antidote.
I only upload important data to my own domain name using open sourced data formats. Web 2.0 is for all the crap I can afford to walk away from.
I'll probably get flamed for saying this, but he got what he paid for. Sure, he paid $24/year. $24 a year? That's a pittance. If his photos and such were so very important, maybe he should have put them on a site with a guaranteed SLA, not on a mostly free site that also has a "pro" plan. Sure, Flicker fucked up on this, but the real fault lies with the user for trusting important stuff to a $24/year plan. And then bitching about it. Life sucks, move on.
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