Flickr accidentally deletes user with 4,000 pictures in cloud computing horror story
It might just be a website, but for Flickr afficinados it’s the ultimate betrayal. Users of the popular picture sharing site tend to be a bit, shall we say, passionate about their favourite web destination. The thought of it all vanishing into thin air is nothing short of chilling.
Flickr accidentally deleted user Mirco Wilhelm, along with his 4,000 photographs, in a move the Yahoo-owned site blames on a ‘mix-up’. Wilhelm, who has been with Flickr for five years, is lucky in the sense that he has back-ups of all his photographs. Yahoo has also offered him four years’ free pro-membership to Flickr, worth $100.
But Wilhelm is far from happy. Writes the IT programmer on his blog: ‘So how can this really compensate losing close to 4000 “linked” pictures from my web albums? I have to recreate most of these links manually, which will take weeks, if not months of my free time!’
Flickr addiction aside, the event also serves as a warning of the dangers of storing data in the cloud, where the user ultimately has to trust the provider to keep it safe. While remote storage looks likely to be the way of the future, stories like these mean we will all be running home to back up our pictures, blogs and text documents on good, old-fashioned hardware for a while still.
2 comments
This has nothing to do with Cloud Computing… this is an Internet site that hosts Photos as was well before Cloud term was ever thought of or hyped! press like this gives for confusion and why people are scared of cloud when press like this creates a myth
Any serious photographer would never trust their photo library to online storage alone. We have unedited image or RAW files, edited files, files in different formats for different uses, and so on. Flickr doesn’t offer enough flexibility even at the pro level.
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