In the past few days I have been receiving the following message when I visit Flickr. Needless to say it scares the shit out of me. I have close to 12,000 photos on Flickr, so when they say they don't have them....well it's not a good feeling.
A number of us use external services like Flickr or YouTube to store our content. Most of the time it's free and easy. In the case of Flickr it's not free, I pay the yearly subscription fee. In the end though, we're putting a tremendous amount of faith in their hands.
Visitor Comments
Yep, I'm paranoid w/my photos so in addition to Flickr I have them in iPhoto, copied to my iPod, and backed up to an external drive. Maybe I should put them in Amazon S3 for another source of online redundancy...
Posted by: Chris | September 5, 2007 3:03 PM
Not just them, but their providers and so on. So when places like 365 Main drop the ball, it's a scare as well.
Posted by: jharr | September 5, 2007 4:06 PM
I've had trouble today with Flickr, both loading the home page and with the speed uploader.
Posted by: Jeff | September 5, 2007 4:29 PM
I like how it says you have over 112,000 views of 0 photos.
Posted by: joe sleeper | September 5, 2007 6:47 PM
I've wondered about similar things of entrusting my data to external servers. I back up my home stuff to external servers, so what happens when those external servers go away?
Posted by: Fritz | September 5, 2007 7:20 PM
Redundancy is your friend is your friend!
Flickr is, I think, unlikely to just lose everything altogether (being part of Yahoo) but ultimately it's good if everything important exists in 2 places.
But it's wise not to trust free services too much.
(By the way, every time I try to leave a comment on your blog, Safari crashes in an ugly way.)
Posted by: John Whiteside | September 6, 2007 10:05 AM