Precious photos disappear

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/02/02/BUG7QB3U0S1.DTL

by sarvesh • 17 years ago

22 17 17 years ago

robotron• 17 years ago

Another argument for not relying too heavily on the cloud. Keep local backups and tell your parents/grandparents/whoever to keep local backups.

pavel_lishin• 17 years ago

Local backups and a few offsite backups, too. Recently paranoia has hit, and I'm planning on storing everything that I hold dear in at least two online locations and two local ones.

vijayshankar• 17 years ago

This brings up a new question to me. How to decide on the number of and kind of backups?

callmeed2• 17 years ago

There was a "cloud" in 2005?

lanaer• 17 years ago

The buzzword did not yet exist, but the pattern of keeping stuff online did (even though it was not as popular as now).

jcapote• 17 years ago

What cloud? She wasn't even paying for the service...

anthonyrubin• 17 years ago

What is the deal with the second half of the article?

pixelbath• 17 years ago

I noticed the same thing in an LA Times article: http://www.latimes.com/sports/custom/morningbriefing/la-sp-r...

Maybe it's search engine crawler food?

sarvesh• 17 years ago

Doesn't look like they intended to do that, ignore it.

FlorinAndrei2• 17 years ago

Make multiple copies of everything.

One copy on your media server - you know, the one you access via the PS3 or some other UPnP client in your living room.

One copy on a USB drive stored in a bank safe, ideally not too close physically to your home.

One copy (or more) distributed to your parents, in-laws, etc. Bonus points if they live in a different area.

Synchronize copies once in a while.

callmeed2• 17 years ago

HN needs a "blast from the past" category or something.

Yes, there are valuable lessons here, but I was still in my twenties when this article was written.

With the price of cloud storage these days, there's no reason to delete a user's data because of inactivity. We don't do it at nextproof–then again, we charge based on storage.

Timothee• 17 years ago

From this article, I'd take this user experience lesson: "It does, and in fact may start alerting members to the looming demise of their photo albums when they log on to the site -- a much more consumer- friendly approach."

You can't always rely on the email address you have on file. Since she was still using the service, doubling the message on the UI would have worked.

patio11• 17 years ago

And people wonder why some pay money for Smugmug when there are free options available. I don't: they're pretty fanatical about making sure that this never happens to them.

I can't remember the blog post about it where they discussed how many redundant hardware installations they had prior to moving to Amazon, but their sales page conveys the general impression:

http://www.smugmug.com/photos/photo-video-backup/

Precious photos disappear

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