Photobucket loses all my personal pictures and videos

[Gennesy]

Arizona

So i have a free photobucket account with all of my pictures and videos. Including my sons birth and 1dt year photis and videos which i cannot get back any other way! Yes i know everyone says to back them up several times but i dont like to have usbs and flashdrives everywhere that anyone can get ahold of them so i had them online on photobucket 'trusting' that they would be safe. I log in one day and find out everything is just gone. I contacted photobucket support for help and they tell me:
"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 to your account.
Once again, we strongly apologize for this inconvenience and thank you for your patience."

Is there anything else i can do?? I want my sons videos of his 1st year back all the photos. Its something that is irreplacable. Force them to look for them or sue them. I don,t understand how it can just be left like this?!? Trying not to freak out but thats my 1st sons birth pictures.. please someone help.

 

[Just Blue]

Arizona

So i have a free photobucket account with all of my pictures and videos. Including my sons birth and 1dt year photis and videos which i cannot get back any other way! Yes i know everyone says to back them up several times but i dont like to have usbs and flashdrives everywhere that anyone can get ahold of them so i had them online on photobucket 'trusting' that they would be safe. I log in one day and find out everything is just gone. I contacted photobucket support for help and they tell me:
"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 to your account.
Once again, we strongly apologize for this inconvenience and thank you for your patience."

Is there anything else i can do?? I want my sons videos of his 1st year back all the photos. Its something that is irreplacable. Force them to look for them or sue them. I don,t understand how it can just be left like this?!? Trying not to freak out but thats my 1st sons birth pictures.. please someone help.

What did you do with the originals? Where are they?

 

[quincy]

Your first mistake, as you already know, was not backing up your content. You should have saved your important photos and videos to your computer's hard drive at the very least.

The Photobucket terms and conditions state that you are responsible for your content, your use of the site is "at your own risk" and Photobucket is not responsible if any of your content is deleted. "In no event shall Photobucket be liable to you or any third party for any indirect, consequential, exemplary, incidental, special or punitive damages ..."

Photobucket might have your content stored in backup files or servers and might be able to locate them for you, and you might be able to recover the originals (as Blue Meanie has implied). I hope for you that is the case.

But the responsibility for safeguarding your content is on you and I am afraid I see no legal action for you to take.

 

[adjusterjack]

Yes i know everyone says to back them up several times but i dont like to have usbs and flashdrives everywhere that anyone can get ahold of them

That's a cop-out and a very dangerous one as you have just found out.

You could have had multiple back up choices online and at home.

I hope photobucket manages to find your stuff.

As you make new memories going forward, make redundant backups.

 

[quincy]

... As you make new memories going forward, make redundant backups.

I do worry about those who rely solely on their electronic devices to safely store important photos. We always get hard copies printed.

If Gennesy viewed his photos or videos recently and then also recently found they were missing from Photobucket, however, it is possible (maybe not all that probable) that they can be located in his computer's cache.

 

[Just Blue]

I do worry about those who rely solely on their electronic devices to safely store important photos. We always get hard copies printed.

If Gennesy viewed his photos or videos recently and then also recently found they were missing from Photobucket, however, it is possible (maybe not all that probable) that they can be located in his computer's cache.

I understand how OP feels...I lost a lot of photos of my eldest in a flood....But luck was with me as most of my family had copies of them. Something to be said for doing it the ol' timey way. I do wish I made more copies of eldest at Redds Pond petting the baby duck..It was beautiful.

 

[quincy]

I understand how OP feels...I lost a lot of photos of my eldest in a flood....But luck was with me as most of my family had copies of them. Something to be said for doing it the ol' timey way. I do wish I made more copies of eldest at Redds Pond petting the baby duck..It was beautiful.

We always send copies of our best photos to family members. Should disaster strike, we should be all set with replacements. Of all our possessions, I think we value family photos the most.

 

[Just Blue]

We always send copies of our best photos to family members. Should disaster strike, we should be all set with replacements. Of all our possessions, I think we value family photos the most.

Yup!!

////////

 

[FlyingRon]

Yep, I split my photos between the cloud (notably flickr) and a couple of backup devices. I have this thing called an iosafe which is supposedly a fireproof hard drive. One of these days I'm going to find an offsite backup place. The problem with backups is that if you don't check them from time to time they may fail lulling you into a false sense of security. For an interesting story on that, read about the Toy Story 2 development. They lost their filesystem due to an errant command run. They found out their backups were useless. The only thing that saved them is that an employee had taken a copy of everything home ot work at home and they very carefully recovered it from her computer.

 

[quincy]

Yep, I split my photos between the cloud (notably flickr) and a couple of backup devices. I have this thing called an iosafe which is supposedly a fireproof hard drive. One of these days I'm going to find an offsite backup place. The problem with backups is that if you don't check them from time to time they may fail lulling you into a false sense of security. For an interesting story on that, read about the Toy Story 2 development. They lost their filesystem due to an errant command run. They found out their backups were useless. The only thing that saved them is that an employee had taken a copy of everything home ot work at home and they very carefully recovered it from her computer.

I remember reading about the Toy Story 2 deletion and the discovery that their backups failed. Even professionals mess up.

There is something to be said, as BlueMeanie says, for the "ol' timey way." I hate to think of all the photos and letters that would have been lost to history had computers been used long ago. With communication primarily by texts and emails, diaries replaced by online journals and blogs, and photos and videos stored online, I fear that years from now there will be no solid records left to document this period of time.

 

[CTU]

I remember reading about the Toy Story 2 deletion and the discovery that their backups failed. Even professionals mess up.

There is something to be said, as BlueMeanie says, for the "ol' timey way." I hate to think of all the photos and letters that would have been lost to history had computers been used long ago. With communication primarily by texts and emails, diaries replaced by online journals and blogs, and photos and videos stored online, I fear that years from now there will be no solid records left to document this period of time.

That just left me with a very profound sadness.

 

[quincy]

That just left me with a very profound sadness.

What might make you even sadder is that my family has always been encouraged to hand write letters, keep hand written journals and print out photos. History is apt to be skewed a bit because this period of time might be evidenced only by my family's documentation of it.

 

[Mass_Shyster]

When I was in college, my family visited Hawaii. At Pearl Harbor, a sailor recognized the T-Shirt I was wearing from my school. We took some photos, and got his parents' information. When we returned, my mother called his mother, told her the story, and said she'd mail the photos as soon as they were developed.

She mailed the film to one of the places that put envelopes in the Sunday Paper. A few weeks went by, and all but one roll of film came back developed. The one with the pics of the sailor never came back.

After reading the fine print on the envelope, we learned that they limited their liability to the value of the unexposed roll of film.

It's pretty sad that a single keystroke can now delete a lifetime of photos.