Stovebolt.com Forums The Back Office IT Short Bus Photobucket ransome.

I had free Photobucket for years then they went pay for storage and I lost access to my early photos. I accidentally ran across them in an ad for a Photobucket subscription. The question is if I pay for a month or accept the free trial will I be able to capture my pictures and move them somewhere else? Maybe to a recommended site.

Not sure on that one. I know our "cost" for PB was $10 a year! We got major bang for those bucks. It was so cheap, we set up on PB just for IRWIPI and we got one for our family photos.

After seeing what happened to Webshots, was not going to take that risk.

AAMOF, we went way over the image limit with the Bolt Bucket but they did not say anything. We may be grandfathered in with that (was also the free account initially). We plan to start a new Bolt-flic with a Flickr account.

If you found them in PB, I'd do what it takes to make sure you have access to them. If nothing else, it'll be smart to get them back on to your computer and save on a thumb drive. (Not a cloud fan here.)

I know it was impossible to get any response to PB (with email, phone, etc.). So, I let sleeping dogs lie. (There were some changes we wanted to make in the Bolt Bucket ... nothing big.)

Ron: Officially no. According to Photobucket if you did not switch to the paid version when they started requiring it they are "gone". That said, a lot of services say that they will delete your stuff if you don't change the service but don't actually do it. Having that in the contract lets them delete stuff any time without having to jump through hoops, but their real goal is to get you to start paying and if you don't have a huge collection of images their cost is minimal.

In practice, I would bet money that they are still there. I used free photobucket back in 2000-2001 and just recently ran across my account name after not thinking about it for at least a decade. I did the free trial out of curiosity and all my stuff was still there.

As long as you remember the cancel the trial after getting your stuff back, it should be pretty quick and easy to retrieve it. Like Peggy said, never trust the cloud for anything. If it is not stored on multiple copies of a high quality long term storage medium in your possession, then it is like grass in the wind.

Also, never, EVER trust a hard drive to store important stuff. Make some sort of backup file- - - - -used to be floppy discs, then CD's, now I guess it's a thumb drive. Hard drives can go belly up with virtually no warning, taking all those important files with them! Don't ask me how I learned that hard lesson!
Jerry

We also "heard tell" of such disasters. We did same with floppy, CD, then thumb drive. Then we had an external driver. Once the postage size disc got way bigger, we moved to that AND the bigger size thumb drive.

Here, our Synology has a secondary backup in the machine and it's solid state, not CD.

We have a lot of data. We lost it all once from a lightening strike. We had to pay to get it retrieved. Came back in a pile of CDs and it was a pain to sort through. But, we probably got 85% back. Fortunately, there was enough of Stovebolt on the server. Notes and such were on PC but most of it was there. It took over a month to sort out.

Now, the Stovebolt server has several backups there in Texas with the new hosting company. We pay a little extra every month for a second backup to go to the cloud. (Don't trust the cloud but that's the plan that the hosting company has.)

Before this, Paul had two servers and one served as a backup for the other.

I keep my data on a mirrored raid setup in my server with a spinning plate backup in my fire safe in the detached garage and a spinning plate backup in a buddy's firesafe across town.

Pro-tip from someone in the memory industry: don't use flash drives or SSDs for long term backup/storage. Long term data retention is not a solved problem and gets worse every generation.

Fibonachu, Some were visible and others were labeled over my limit. Others were fussy like looking threw a very foggy plate glass window and it said I was over my limit. I am hoping I can still find them, I was using my phone when I found them this time.