Following the announcement that Yahoo! don’t care too much for Delicious anymore, I’ve been worrying away about Flickr. I know a few others have been too.
Phil Bradley points out that a great tool exists for backing up all your Flickr photos, so if Yahoo! decides to flickr the switch to off, you still have all those memories.
It’s called Flickredit and is an open source effort, and well worth trying out.
While you’re at it, think about the content you have on other services and have a look for ways of backing it all up, just in case.
Good idea Dave,
Any recommendations of where to back the photos up, the reason i started using flickr is that the space required on my computer wasn’t enough – that was when i started so i suspect space required is even higher now?
have you used external hard drive?
Hey Carl. Usual rule with backups is to have three copies. One is your ‘working’ copy, which in this case would be Flickr. Second would be to have a local copy, so if you haven’t a beefy enough HDD on your PC then yeah, an external disk drive would be best. They’re quite cheap these days – I just searched Amazon and you can get a 1TB one for £50!
Thirdly, put another backup online somewhere – either DIY with Amazon S3 or use an automated service like Carbonite.com. I use the latter and it’s pretty good.
An interesting comment from Carl; I always kinda thought this was a moot point as my mentality has been to use Flickr as a sharing platform, rather than my primary photo store solution. I was, however, thinking of using it as a backup after a recent incident where I nearly lost all my family pics. I do use a 500Gb external HDD for storage, however this is really my primary medium; my C drive tends to get used as temp space and a higgeldy pigeldy area for program installs. Carbonite looks pretty decent so I’ll certainly be checking that out.
It’s interesting to see how different people use these services but, as Dave points out, with the cost of external storage so cheap these days I personally feel that we should all be keeping our primary versions of files and data local and easily transferable.
I’ve been using Backupify for a while (10 months in fact) to backup Flickr, Twitter, Google calendar and Facebook data. Excellent service and no problems retrieving the data.
I like it as an ‘all-in-one’ social media backup system, which also supports Google docs and other mail and photo services.
Thanks all, will try a few of the above