Sunday, January 4, 2009

A failed online album; again!

My online photo album http://ymhow.fotopic.net/ is shut down. There's nothing I can do about it, as it is a free service. I have not been able to access it recently, so I decided to find out what happened. Apparently the company was sold off in May 2008. The new company did not revive it and the domain name has been decommissioned. Fortunately I have organized my backup in such a way that I can easily set up a new album on another website.

My previous album was hosted by pbase.com . Initially free, it started charging a subscription after becoming hugely popular among photographers. As I did not update my email address with them, they were not able to inform me that they were removing my pictures since I did not subscribe. Thus I lost my first-ever online album, although I still have the photos. Those photos were all taken with my first digital camera, a quite unheard of Casio.

Lesson from this experience: always have a backup for whatever you keep in the computing "cloud". Free websites owe nothing to you in the event of a failure. Neither can paid web-sites compensate you for any loss. I will probably sign up with pbase.com and set up my album there in a couple of month's time.

p.s. (12 Feb 2009) Soon after I posted the above, the fotopic photo album site was activated again. So I will continue to use it.