PhotoBucket lost all my pics.

[ScottG]

They lost everything and have told me they cant get it back.
It's unbelievable. All the family history, projects, etc. Gone.
I knew I should have backed it all up but I just didn't think all would be lost. That much is my responsibility.
Still, I cannot warn people enough about these guys; let me be an example of why you shouldn't trust them with sole possession of your valuable pictures.

Scott

Email from PB:
Hello,

We thank you for your patience while we investigated the matter. Our engineering team has been working tirelessly to identify and recover your images. They identified a technical issue that had 1 out of a billion odds of occurring. Unfortunately, your account was one of the handful that were affected. They have spent countless hours to recover your images, but yielded no results. They have added additional safeguards in place to make sure this never happens again.

We are refunding all charges that may have been made for the past 12 months. In addition, we will be providing a year of our AdFree subscription.

Once again, we strongly apologize for this inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

Josh@Photobucket Support

[mr__ed]

Fizz wrote:
You did not back it up?
I'm baffled and bewildered.

X2. Picasa had deleted all my photos on their site, but I had backed them up on CD's previously. Even though, there were still some unbacked up photos on their site which are now lost. Fortunately, they weren't too important. I never put full trust in any cloud storage site. I back everything up to external media, just in case.

[ChuckSteed]

We've had some issues with PB over the years. We added a 3 TB USB disk and out all pics on it.. also switched everything over to google photos as it is so job easier to share pics, make albums to share, etc.

[magicbus]

Ah yes, the cloud... :W

Massive Internet Outage Caused By Amazon Cloud Glitch

Dave

[drsteve]

Still doesn't make sense PB didn't have a back-up I'm sure they run raid systems and mirror all drives.

You can be sure they had several. That's why they told OP it was a one in a billion accident.

[garry1p]

Still doesn't make sense PB didn't have a back-up I'm sure they run raid systems and mirror all drives.

[AsheGuy]

drsteve wrote:
"The cloud" is a marketing term. It's just another backup service, they've been around for years under less interesting names like "server farm".

"The cloud" is not just a backup service, it is also includes apps that run on the server instead of on a workstation, e.g Google Photos, Google Docs, etc. and all other vender's cloud apps.

fj12ryder wrote:
Or "mainframe" when there were just dumb terminals. Used to be you couldn't store all your data at your terminal, now you can but don't want to. Go figure.

You can still store all you data on your workstation if you choose, but there are many reasons not to for many people. A few are:

• When an app is updated, it only has to be updated on the server, not on all workstations.
  
• Data is available to any workstation anywhere with proper credentials.
  
• Data security and backup is not dependent on every workstation operator.
  
• Etc, etc.
  

These motivations are more important to business and organizations rather then us as individuals but some still apply.

"The cloud" is the wave now, but stay tuned. It too will be superseded. 🙂

[fj12ryder]

Or "mainframe" when there were just dumb terminals. Used to be you couldn't store all your data at your terminal, now you can but don't want to. Go figure.

[drsteve]

"The cloud" is a marketing term. It's just another backup service, they've been around for years under less interesting names like "server farm".

[2oldman]

fj12ryder wrote:
I would no more trust all my data to a cloud service than I would trust it with an unknown neighbor

I wouldn't either. It's just another tool for data storage.

[fj12ryder]

2oldman wrote:

fulltimedaniel wrote:

Somehow many people are convinced that "The Cloud" is some magical place safe from the same problems that plague their own machines and regular servers.

Considering this is the first time we've (or I ) have ever heard of a cloud service losing anything, I think they have a pretty good track record.

Google the problem of data loss and "cloud" services and you'll find lots of issues with lost data, and other problems.

I would no more trust all my data to a cloud service than I would trust it with an unknown neighbor who swears he'll watch over it as if it were his own. 🙂 If it's important to me I'll take the responsibility of caring for it.

[AsheGuy]

fulltimedaniel wrote:
This is probably the most brilliant turn of a phrase since "New and Improved"

Well, it's certainly improved from any method I have used before for numerous reasons. The major cloud (server) companies have a major economic vested interest in their services being reliable. You can bet their focus is on their backup systems.

PhotoBucket is not in the top 10 cloud computing companies according to this survey. I use Google Photos for photos and Dropbox for most of my documents. I have never had any problem with either and am confident that their backup systems far surpass anything I could do in that regard, even though I do have my own copy of photos and documents.

[2oldman]

fulltimedaniel wrote:

Somehow many people are convinced that "The Cloud" is some magical place safe from the same problems that plague their own machines and regular servers.

Considering this is the first time we've (or I ) have ever heard of a cloud service losing anything, I think they have a pretty good track record.

[fulltimedaniel]

"The Cloud" is a marketing term for just another set of servers at a giant server farm. Servers are mechanical/Electrical/Electronic and Software machines.

There are thousands of ways they can malfunction.

Somehow many people are convinced that "The Cloud" is some magical place safe from the same problems that plague their own machines and regular servers.

This is probably the most brilliant turn of a phrase since "New and Improved"

[bcsdguy]

Horizon170 wrote:
All my pics are on the hard drive before being copied to PB so I have two of the same pics in different places so then I put the pics on a CD or Data Stick Sometime I even save the original 3-1/2" disk that the original pic was taken by my 20 yr. old Sony Mavica. duh----Yea, I'm very old school. Some pics I have on 5-6 different drives/disks/etc. I scanned a bunch years ago and pasted to MS Word.
I may not be the sharpest knife in the kitchen but I can still cut. LOL

AND, you still have your pics.