
Precious photos disappear - sarvesh
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/02/02/BUG7QB3U0S1.DTL
======
robotron
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
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
This brings up a new question to me. How to decide on the number of and kind
of backups?

~~~
crk
Before my son was born, I just backed up everything on my local server, as
well as one of my webservers. Since a few of my close friends now have
children, we all host local backups of each other's photos. We started that
after a friend had a house fire and lost all their photos stored on a local
server.

I also do a yearly photobook with DVD(s) for my son. The photo book has the
best pictures, with the back story for each. The DVD(s) has all our family
pictures and videos worth saving for that year. I send out copies to my son's
grandparents and great grandparents.

~~~
TooMuchNick
Wow, it's the buddy system for backup! That's a great solution to the
psychological barrier: usually, no one but you can tell you to backup your
personal data.

I went to a Christian college where everyone was issued laptops, so several of
my friends used a special program to share their web histories with
"accountability partners." Then they could monitor each other's porn use,
ideally to keep them from looking at any porn. Having backup buddies reminds
me of that (without the scary religious suppression of natural urges).

In fact, I might be better at making sure my friend shows me photos of _his_
family than making sure I back up my own. Of course, that's one thing cloud
computing was supposed to solve in the first place.

------
Timothee
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
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/>

------
FlorinAndrei
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.

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

~~~
pixelbath
I noticed the same thing in an LA Times article:
[http://www.latimes.com/sports/custom/morningbriefing/la-
sp-r...](http://www.latimes.com/sports/custom/morningbriefing/la-sp-
random4-2009feb04,0,366994.story)

Maybe it's search engine crawler food?

------
callmeed
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.

