

Flickr Restores Mirco Wilhelm's 3,400 Lost Photos - sushi
http://www.observer.com/2011/tech/flickr-restores-mirco-wilhelms-3400-lost-photos-and-really-really-sorry-about

======
pyre
Sounds like the customer service end of the business didn't talk to the
technical side. Since there wasn't a push button functionality for account
recovery (and it had probably never even been done before in a quick-and-dirty
fashion either) to them it was gone permanently. The photos probably would
never have been recovered had this issue not gotten so much attention though.
This probably forced the two sides to talk (either an exec said, "Fix this" or
someone on the tech side saw the publicity and said, "Wait a minute. It's
still recoverable. WTF was that rep talking about?").

~~~
patio11
That is fairly routine and understandable. Let's talk about a hypothetical
SaaS system built on behalf of a large institution -- say, a university --
which does not include an admin accessible undelete feature because features
cost money and they struck that one from the spec.

Let's imagine that this purely hypothetical university had a user who
accidentally blew away some data. From the perspective of the sysadmin, thtr
data is unrecoverable. But _data is never really unrecoverable_. Data is like
oil: if you have enough money, we can drill arbitrarily deep for it.

Let's pretend that the undelete feature would have cost our hypothetical
university X. "Drill as deep as you need" might get quoted at 100X or more.
And that is _totally_ reasonable, based on the hypothetical costs and benefits
of the hypothetical data recovery.

~~~
halostatue
> But _data is never really unrecoverable_.

I agree with your comment, but this one sentence is sadly not true. Until last
summer, Seagate Recovery Services (formerly ActionFront) was a division of the
company I work at. Their Canadian lab is still collocated with us. A disk
drive I took to them was completely unrecoverable (the head was scraping the
platters). Now, partially _because_ I work in the dats protection industry, I
had another copy of the data. The point remains that the drive in question is
unrecoverable.

I'm also aware of, but have no details on, a customer lawsuit that relates to
the customers' missing data where the customer misconfigured their backup.
Significant chunks of that data are apparently gone forever, too.

~~~
frisco
A head crash (assuming that's what you're describing when you say, "the head
was scraping the platters") is good example of "it's always recoverable with
enough money". For example, if you're _really_ willing to spend money, there
are special atomic force microscopes ("magnetic force" microscopes) that
actually spin _around_ the platter, which stays still, allowing individual
bits to be read off of the disk.

Of course, if the magnetic field is gone then it's certainly possible for it
to be truly unrecoverable, but that bar is very very high.

One firm, DriveSavers (which incidentally is who Apple sends all their data
recovery problems to), has an ISO-5 cleanroom and maintains a hall-of-fame of
ridiculous situations they've successfully recovered:
[http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/company-
info/museum-o...](http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/company-info/museum-
of-bizarre-disk-asters/)

------
doki_pen
It could be that the rep was scared to let anyone to know he messed up, so he
didn't escalate the issue. Costumer should have asked to be connected with
supervisor.

------
natrius
They should've extended his account until 2038. "According to our records,
your account expired in 1901. Sorry."

