Cloud storage nightmare with Flickr

In silicon valley, you can’t have a conversation in a group (of geeks) without hearing about a cloud-fanatic who’s going to get rid of all local storage and live “in the cloud”. Sounds cool, but that shouldn’t prevent one from doing backups. A Flickr user learned the hard way when his account got hacked and 3000 of his photos were deleted by the hacker, who also closed his account. The account owner is now campaigning against Flickr’s support. 

You can imagine how mad that person was, but it gets worse: Flickr cannot retrieve his data and we guess that this is because they were deleted in a seemingly “legitimate” manner (from Flickr’s point of view). We think that Flickr is built to survive some catastrophic hardware failure, but if an account is closed, the data is immediately deleted - permanently.

I can’t say that enough: the web is no substitute to backups! It’s a convenient access but, you should make sure that you work is safe in multiple locations. Companies can be hacked, or go belly up.