Don't Worry, Says Facebook, Your Photos are Safe
Over the weekend, some Facebook users began to experience issues with their photos. Some photos weren't displaying at all while others only displayed a "question mark" graphic when you tried to view them. As it turns out, the issue was caused by a failure on the drive on which these photos were stored. The outage affected 10 to 15 percent of photos, which, given the site's current status as the top social network worldwide, is a hefty number. However, a recent post on the Facebook blog assured users that their photos were safe, backed up in several locations, and would be restored soon.
Where Are Your Facebook Photos?
According to the company, during a routine upgrade on Friday night, they ran into some problems with photo storage. The issue appears to have stemmed from several drives failing at once. Because simultaneous hardware failure such as this is rare, Facebook says they're still trying to figure out what happened.
In the meantime, though, the photos are being copied to new drives - a process that can take some time due to the large amount of data that was affected. The company asked users not to worry because they store photos in a way that maintains multiple copies of the data in case of hardware failures such as this. By early this week, everything should be back to normal.
The Cloud is Not Perfect
This recent issue with Facebook photos is just one of many cloud-based outages and issues we've seen recently - a trend that moved some to question the level of trust we should have for these online services. Over the past few weeks, we've seen the social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia completely fry and lose all their customers' data when the service's database crashed and took with it a half a terabyte of information. Unfortunately, no reliable backups were to be had.
But while Ma.gnolia may have represented the dangers of trusting a small startup with your data, Google has proved that even companies as large as themselves are not immune from problems. A recent four-hour Gmail outage from routine maintenance "gone wrong," caused a cascading failure in Google's European data centers.
And on the heels of the Gmail outage, Google Groups also went down for some time. All groups were affected for a short while.
These incidents led Google to follow in the footsteps of other cloud storage companies like SalesForce.com and Amazon in the launch of a Google Apps status dashboard so they could better communicate with customers whether their online applications were up and running.
In Google's case, repairs were made and customers were credited as necessary, but even so many businesses and individuals were affected in ways that can't necessarily be quantified so easily. Although some quickly rallied to Google's defense, reminding that Gmail's uptime is often much better than on-site hosted email systems, the point many folks are missing is that unlike in "the old days," not everyone keeps copies of their data on their computers anymore - so when the cloud shuts down, that data is just gone, albeit only temporarily in most cases.
Be Safe, Use More than One Service!
Still, even if you've switched over to cloud services for storing and accessing the majority of your data, you can prevent outages from affecting you. The trick is to store your data in more than one online service or use a hybrid cloud/desktop solution. For example, if your email is mission critical, use an IMAP-enabled desktop or mobile client. Those doing so during Gmail's outage were able to access their inbox to retrieve old emails - they just couldn't send and receive.
For photos, like the ones that recently went missing from Facebook, there are a number of online services where they could have been stored. Today, there's really no reason to only keep your photos in one spot. An easy way to upload photos to multiple sites is to use a tool like Pixelpipe which shoots photos, videos, and audio files to over 60 social networks, photo/video sites, and blogs.
Even documents can be stored in more than one location. Google Docs and Zoho may be the best known of the web office services, but you could also keep critical files saved to your computer then backed up using another third party backup service like Mozy. Or you could upload files to storage sites like Google's own Google Sites or Microsoft's "Sharepoint Lite" Office Live.
No matter what you do, there's always a chance of losing data, even if you only save files on your computer, completely eschewing the cloud altogether. But that's probably not as safe as keeping files in multiple online services. With the number of services available, an outage shouldn't mean we have to lose access to our files. Use hybrid solutions or spread your data across multiple services instead and you'll almost always be okay, outage or not.
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In addition to uploading all of my photos with Picasa, I also have them backed up with Mozy. Now I need to get on a schedule to keep local backups. With so many memories in those digital photos, I have to make sure they're around forever.
Hi Sarah, While the cloud may not be perfect just yet, I also strongly recommend trying Live Mesh (www.mesh.com) to backup and keep your data in sync between different devices.
Adequate back-up and storage are just two of the considerations companies must make when moving data to the cloud.
As an employee of an online database company, I know how important access to one's business critical data is. We continually back-up customer data and our customers also have the ability to export data to excel at anytime if they want to create their own back-up.
Our CEO and CTO recently recorded a podcast with some tips for evaluating SaaS offerings.
@Anand - I use Live Mesh & love it! But even that has some kinks to work out.
I have been very happy using Syncplicity this sort of thing. It creates online backups of any local folders you specify, and then can sync them to any number of other local computers (laptops, office vs. work computer, etc) in real-time.
It also syncs all photos to Facebook and Picnik, and all docs to Google Docs and Zoho Writer. And anything that gets uploaded to those services gets synced back to Syncplicity and then back to your local machine(s).
That means, for every photo or document I create, I have at least FIVE backups in various places: local computer, laptop, Facebook/Picnik or Google/Zoho, plus Syncplicity's own servers, which keep unlimited versions of changed files and has all backups available on-demand in real time.
I think they have something like 2GB storage for free, though I pay $9.99 for 50 GB. Totally worth the money, in my opinion. I lost all my bookmarks when Ma.gnolia went down -- I can't imagine risking all my photos and docs by entrusting them to any single cloud service (or local hard drive).
My only complaint is that they don't do delta sync, meaning every time a file is changed, it is uploaded in full to their server instead of just uploading the changed portions. Not a problem for a Word doc, but with a 2 GB Photoshop doc, it can be a pain. Not as much of a pain as losing everything in a crash though.
The cloud is not the answer. I highly recommend investing in an external hard drive. Memory is cheap these days. $100 gets you a quality 500GB drive and then some. I've also seen 1TB drives on sale for under $150. Prices will continue to drop. You can even get 2 drives to be safe. External hard drives are small so it isn't like they'll take up much space either; my mom has one that is smaller than an ipod.
In addition, there are privacy issues with relying solely on the cloud to store your data. This is because there are little to no privacy protections for your data in the cloud. For that reason, use the cloud to only store data you need online and remove it when you no longer need it out in the ether.
We're looking for anyone interested in becoming a beta tester for our Cloud offering. We'd love for you to give us a try and provide us feedback as we tailor our services to what users need. As the article states, the Cloud isn't perfect, but we're doing everything we can to be best in class!
Try http://www.MyOtherDrive.com for online storage and file sharing. Their online backup is professional grade with scheduled, automated backups and encryption. And unlike other "backup" only sites, they offer the best file sharing on the net, with both public and private file sharing.
Check out my new CARTOON about the ongoing Google outages at:
http://www.pcdisorder.com/2009/03/gmail-imitates-economy.html
With Gears and Offline Access enabled, you will be able to access any of your emails, Google Docs, and calendar items during an outage. It's still relatively new, but essential in this type of situation.
Facebook photos are disappearing again! Its happened to me and my friends, a dozen or more are gone from my pages. But it tells me "not to worry!"