Why you should be wary of FLickr...

AnnaV said:
Interesting article here. As usual, just make sure all your stuff is backed up in more than one place, and especially don't rely on a third party.

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2848
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You'd be several sandwiches short of a picnic to even consider counting Flickr (or PhotoBucket, or SmugMug, or any other similar site) as a back-up in the first place.
 
Alastair said:
You'd be several sandwiches short of a picnic to even consider counting Flickr (or PhotoBucket, or SmugMug, or any other similar site) as a back-up in the first place.
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Love the phraseology and so true!
 
Exactly, but I bet there are people who do so they can free up more HDD space...
 
If Flickr went down it would take a very long time to get back on it's feet, and a lot of uploading at once may cause a server overload too.
 
Alarmist article. Doesn't mean Flickr is going to disappear any time soon, nor Yahoo!

Yahoo! may not be doing as well as some of the competition but they are not going away soon.

Yes there are loads of Yahoo! services that die, but that's because they are crap. They keep coming up with new ideas, and they're crap, or there's a better alternative that everyone uses. For all the services that the article mentions have been shut down, Yahoo! have kicked off new ones (though most are still crap).

However Flickr is not a service Yahoo! invented. They bought it. It was great, and still is, and it beats all the competition for social photography. It's way too popular to kill off, and on top of that they make money from it.

Their core search service is not king of search, but it's still widely used and again they make money from the advertising.

There is a risk that Yahoo! goes tits up, but that doesn't mean Flickr goes with it. Almost certainly Google, Microsoft, or maybe even Getty, will buy Flickr from Yahoo! or even just buy the whole of Yahoo!

I'd say Flickr is sufficiently successful that it could be spun off as it's own business and survive on its own.

But yes, regardless, I wouldn't rely on any online photo sharing service as a backup.
 
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Originals on one internal HDD, which is backed up to an external, and is also backed up to secure online storage. Unlikely that all 3 will fail at the same time.
 
Graham00 said:
If Flickr went down it would take a very long time to get back on it's feet, and a lot of uploading at once may cause a server overload too.
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A company the size of Yahoo would probably have enough processing power to make sure the site was back up asap. I doubt an outage on Flickr would last any more than an hour.
 
I have all my photos on HDD, smugmug and on online storage. I have two online storage accounts with two different companies so if one goes wonky I can use the other. One of smugmugs selling points was how many people had computer failure and they just got all their photos back off smugmug. They will also copy them to disk media and post you a copy of all your images. I don't know what processing they do on them though. For normal people that use jpg these online sharing sites are perfectly fine. For pros that shoot in RAW and have massive libraries they aren't.
 
KayJay said:
Dropbox exists
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It does. But is it secure?

  • Can you guarantee that Dropbox won't go broke in the near future? No.
  • Is Dropbox 100% defended against malicious attacks? No.
  • Do all of Dropbox's employees have 100% clean records? Who knows?
  • Do Dropbox guarantee your data is safe? From their T&Cs...
Your access to and use of the Site, Content, Files and Services and is at your own risk. Dropbox will have no responsibility for any harm to your computer system, loss or corruption of data, or other harm that results from your access to or use of the Site, Content, Files or Services.
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Gazza_DJ said:
Disagree.
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I've done some work using the services of a company that offers data storage in a former military nuclear bunker and has all kinds of claims about protecting data in the event of all kinds of disasters (yep, including nuclear strike, and all communications going down worldwide). Knowing what I know now about how they operate, I know there's no such thing as perfect security.

However for my own photos I'm not too fussed about security, so long as I have a lot of backup options and don't keep all my eggs in one basket. One of those options is online backup and that's via Amazon storage. JungleDisk provide the backup software but they don't touch the data as the software talks direct to my Amazon data store. The software provides some encryption however. Amazon's storage is in "the cloud" so it's not stored on one single point of failure server, but spread all over the place. The decryption software for JungleDisk is open source and I can decrypt even if they go bust. Flickr has more chance of going under than Amazon (not that I believe for a moment that Flickr will go under, even if Yahoo! did).
 
hollis_f said:
It does. But is it secure?

  • Can you guarantee that Dropbox won't go broke in the near future? No.
  • Is Dropbox 100% defended against malicious attacks? No.
  • Do all of Dropbox's employees have 100% clean records? Who knows?
  • Do Dropbox guarantee your data is safe? From their T&Cs...
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The same can be applied to ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING. Basically there is nothing that is 100% secure. I'd say that was obvious. But a combination of things, including online data storage, can go someway to providing a pretty good backup strategy.
 
Flickr won't disappear any time soon. It's one of the few products that Yahoo owns that actually makes them money. In saying that you'd be stupid to use it as a backup storage.
 
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