The good news is that when you ask Flickr to delete your account, they really do delete your account.¹ The bad news is that if Flickr inadvertently delete the wrong account you're out of luck:

When Mirco Wilhelm tried to log into his Flickr account yesterday, he was surprised to find that his 5-year-old Pro account with roughly 4,000 photographs had completely vanished. It then dawned on him that only a week earlier he had reported another account for posting stolen photographs.

He immediately contacted Flickr asking if they had deleted the wrong account by mistake [...]

Flickr say that they can restore his account – and have offered him a four year extension of his Pro account for free in compensation for their error – but that they can't do anything about restoring his photos and their associated comments and ratings and so on.

I'm astonished that Flickr apparently have less comprehensive backups of their user's content and associated comments etc than I do of the contents of my Mac Mini's hard disk and my iTunes library, but that would appear to be the case. I know they're operating with ridiculously large quantities of data with more being uploaded/rated/linked to every minute, but they're a big company: isn't one of the reasons we're encouraged to put our data "in the cloud" that a big company is more likely than J Random User to be in a position to keep on top of the latest software patches and make adequate backups?

[Via Memex 1.1]

1. cf Facebook, who famously take their time over the process. ↩

Dave Winer is worried about the web:

We pour so much passion into dynamic web apps hosted by companies we know very little about. We do it without retaining a copy of our data. We have no idea how much it costs them to keep hosting what we create, so even if they're public companies, it's very hard to form an opinion of how likely they are to continue hosting our work.

[...]

This system is terrible. It's a bubble, like the real estate bubble. It's going to burst, and when it does, it will take a lot of our history with it. [...]

I wonder if attitudes about the preservation of our work online will turn out to vary by generation, the way attitudes to online privacy do? Is the backup and export of the words and pictures we put online something only the techie subset of my generation of internet users cares about?¹

[Via Memex 1.1]

1. In part, that depends upon whether danah boyd was right about teens' willingness to discard their profiles as they move on to the next big thing. ↩

Jason Scott wishes to share a simple message:

This will be the last time I go along this area of discussion for a while because it's just going to get very old very quickly. But I wanted, in one place, a quick manifesto/rant about this position. So here we go.

FUCK THE CLOUD.

By the cloud, of course, I mean this idea that you have a local machine, a box running some OS, and a vital, distinct part of what you do and what you're about or what you consider important to you is on other machines that you don't run, don't control, don't buy, don't administrate, and don't really understand. These machines are connected via the internet, and if you have a company then these other machines are not machines run by your company, and if you're a person they are giving it to you without you signing anything accompanied by cash or payment that says "and I mean it".

Can I be clearer than that? It's a sucker's game. It's a game suckers play. If you are playing it, you are a sucker. [...]

Preach on, brother.

[Via Dan Sandler]

The Tao Of Backup.¹

[Via The Tao of Mac]

1. Yes, it's an advert. But it's funny, and true. ↩