Actually, he got his account restored. From his blog on Feb. 2:
http://bindermichi.posterous.com/flicker-a...-round-up-day-2More comments on the original blog posting:
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But since the issue has been resolved, I can finally relax now. The account has been restored, including all the links and comments. the only thing missing seems to be on the other ends. My contacts don't list me as their contact anymore and have to reconnect again.
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I got back everything I lost, despite the information that it wasn't possible
Although I would have like to get this kind of attention for something more pleasant.
Especially with a the trolls calling me irresponsible, arrogant, and worse. I'm just a normal guy working in the IT business with a dedication to prevent things like this to happen to my customers. For me it is ofter very frustrating to see how little attention these things actually get in the corporate world until something like this disaster actually happens.
Looking at the total fallout of media coverage bashing on Flickr and especially Yahoo! this event will cost some people their jobs, and they will not be the ones responsible for the core issues leading to this situation. That's what I am really sorry for, and I actually hope that Yahoo! will learn something from this week... I really do
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For the moment they restored all the "lost" data and gave me a 25 years free subscription. I would also have settled for control and ownership of Delicious, since Yahoo! is shutting them down anyway (and I really like that service)... but, if everything is back to where it was on Sunday I'm OK, personally.
Everything else might also depend on how much the press will continue to kick this story through the channels. For me this put Yahoo! in a position that foced them to solve my problem. For others this might not work this easy or fast.
And to be honest. None of what happend in the last days adressed the core issues, Yahoo! has with it's internal processes and financial situation.
In the end we can only sit back and wait for something to happen.
These are his responses to comments on his first blog post. (What I find really wacky are the nutjobs who attack him on that blog for complaining about the people who stole his photos, and then the other people who attack him for figuring out what it would cost to restore all photos and work IF his time was billed out at the rate his employer charged! There are some seriously hateful people out there...)
Of course, anyone who puts their pictures online at
any photo site without keeping them backed up on their own drives would be a complete fool. (I'm sure there are some out there!) However, that wasn't the issue in this case - he had the photos. With the Flickr account deleted, he lost all the annotations and links both within the site and to external sites. Many, many man-hours of work would have been lost.
Yahoo/Flickr's mistake was to delete the account outright from their database. They could have simply deactivated it. It would appear that they did in fact have a backup from which to restore. I couldn't imagine an operation like that functioning without redundant backups. As we all know, drives fail, and databases can get corrupted.
What's really remarkable about this story is the amount of press it garnered. It's clear that this was NOT the only instance of Flickr doing this to a user - and Wilhelm comments on this in today's blog post:
http://bindermichi.posterous.com/flickr-fallout-5-days-later
