Via switched.com -
A Flickr user recently woke up to his worst nightmare. His account, to which he had uploaded more than 3,000 photos over five years, was hacked and terminated by someone using a Hotmail account. But that's not all.
According to Gawker, Morgan Tepsic, a photographer and student living in Taiwan, spent days sending e-mails and making phone calls to both Flickr HQ and Yahoo! (owner of the site), only to have customer service reps tell him there was no way to recover the photographs, which he says he spent thousands of dollars developing. Tepsic says Flickr should have gone further to protect his account (for which he paid subscription fees) from hackers. He's right on, especially since he never received so much as an e-mail asking him to confirm the account's termination. As it stands, we can only assume that Flickr users pay to use a site that doesn't even backup its data. Gawker tried to get to the bottom of the site's backup procedures, but its e-mails to Yahoo! reps weren't returned.
In the meantime, Tepsic has launched a viral campaign against the photo service. While it's not likely that Flickr or Yahoo! will offer assistance, maybe other users can at least learn from Tepsic's nightmare. Don't rely solely on Web backup. [From: Gawker]
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Really, why would a photographer (professional or not) trust the cloud (Flickr, Facebook, Yahoo!, etc) so much...as to totally ignore the need for local backups?
I have even considered burning my photos from my local drive (which I regularly backup to an external HD) to DVDs and storing them along with my other important documents in a fireproof safe. If these photos were my life-blood / my profession...it would have already been done.
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