Photobucket Just Broke Billions of Photos Across the Web

[redheeler]

Unfortunately even if users abandon Photobucket and move to a new provider, thousands of very useful forum posts with how-to guides, etc, are permanently destroyed.

This is the saddest part. Those that aren't willing to pay such a crazy fee for hotlinking images, and I would say the majority of users that need hotlinking, will just migrate to another service (and therefore this move might turn out to be more harmful for Photobucket themselves). But it doesn't solve the problem of existing hotlinked images breaking.

I have never used Photobucket to host anything, and after this certainly never will.

 

[0388631]

This is the saddest part. Those that aren't willing to pay such a crazy fee for hotlinking images, and I would say the majority of users that need hotlinking, will just migrate to another service (and therefore this move might turn out to be more harmful for Photobucket themselves). But it doesn't solve the problem of existing hotlinked images breaking.

I have never used Photobucket to host anything, and after this certainly never will.

Even if you wanted to swap out the links, it would take forever because PB is incredibly slow. This reminds me of the whole imagshack charade. They tried to pull something similar in 2010 or 2011. Look where they are now.

 

[D.T.]

[...]

Yep, know all that (I mean, I *really* know ), you were talking about DBx having costs X usage, I brought up B2 as the same model but cheaper (including S3, which of course everyone in the industry knows, backends services like DBx). Then you mentioned BB "capping uploads", which they don't, but I'm not sure if you were talking about their personal backup, business backup, or the newer B2 service (which is just an open object store), but none of those do regardless.

I think this exchange is also conflating the _types_ of services that is probably confusing for other readers, I'm going to write a post that outlines the different options because the original post was about "image hosting" solutions that are their own very specific category type (vs. file stores vs. file-store+images vs. backup vs. etc...)

 

[MDMachiavelli]

I suppose I could have been clearer about that, ha - I have a Dropbox where I keep copies of a number of important files, including a few photos. It astounds me that some people keep all their files on one hard drive/cloud service, and then are shocked and appalled when it fails them and they don't have any other copies.

Doesn't Drop Box keep a copy of everything on the users main device?

 

[D.T.]

Doesn't Drop Box keep a copy of everything on the users main device?

On computers, it syncs them across multiple machines so that they're local and cloud replicated.

I've got my Windows dev work in DBx, I work from the local folder, then any changes are sync'ed up to the DBx servers on-the-fly, and then back to other devices on the same account. So occasionally instead of using the Windows notebook (it's a beastly 17" gaming machine), I'll fire up Bootcamp on my MBP, and in a minute or two, I've got fully up to date code in my local Dropbox folders.

The mobile implementation is more of a "client for Dropbox", so files are kept remote unless you select the "Make available offline" for specific files. DBx also has an option to sync photos up from your local photo storage automatically.

 

[SkyBell]

Doesn't Drop Box keep a copy of everything on the users main device?

On my Macs and BlackBerry it does. I don't believe so on my Android phone.

 

[ActionableMango]

A replication service like Dropbox protects you from device failure only--if a device fails then the file is still there on another device or the cloud.

But if you accidentally delete a file, mistakenly change it, or it gets corrupted or harmed by a virus, then all copies are replicated to the new, bad file. So it's not really a backup in that sense.

 

[Huntn]

Doesn't Drop Box keep a copy of everything on the users main device?

I place important documents into Drop Box, not my entire drive. It's frequently used to collaborate documents with others. I don't know if your entire drive can be configured to be backed up automatically.