Your Work & Online Services

I always recommend that client’s own their infrastructure, or if they can’t, that they only uses services that provide a method to backup everything they have uploaded or contributed.

As time goes on, the volume of data, effort, and interractions recorded by these online services has reached sometimes epic proportions.  Hundreds of photos, comments, code snippets, opinions…the list goes on.

At times the sole digital trace of the information, organization or interaction is online and in the hands of a third party — a third party that one assumes will never go out of business, lose it’s data, or feel that it is in their own self-interest to delete your data.

Thomas Hawk is following the story of Shéhérazade who’s Flickr account that had been visited 150,000 times in the last six months, with 22 testimonials and 200 comments per image, was deleted “without any reason, and without warning”. Flickr may have been well within their right to delete the account, but it would seem that a small percentage of photos caused the entire account to be removed, and the user has no option to backup the content.

Apart from searching for cross-feeds, using the WayBackMachine, or checking for some Google archiving, as in this case the data can never be recuperated.

UPDATE:

This evening I noticed that Data Center Knowledge had a video of Alistair Croll (who I’ve known for quite some time) talking about cloud computing and in order to provide a specific example he mentions Flickr and correctly points out that Flickr “owns the metadata” associated with everything you upload.  He goes on to explain that you may be able to move your image, but you cannot move the metadata that went with it, and this now causes us to re-examine what our original content has become and whether we’re willing to lose it’s associated metadata.  Is it worth as much to us without it anymore?

His point was definitely specific to its application in cloud computing, but see the interview with Alistair below: