When it rains bits and bytes, tweet #CloudFail.
This past week, like many Southern Californians, I experienced something rare for the dry state: rain, little droplets of it splashing on sidewalks, side streets, and freeways. I even witnessed two, simultaneous accidents on the 405 while on my way to Orange County.
In a similar manner, I also experienced a #CloudFail of a different kind.
Recently, I wanted to grab some high resolution shots my girlfriend took of her and I. Unfortunately, her hard drive had crashed. But wait! The cloud can save us! “Her back up copies are hosted on Kodak’s Gallery!” I thought. I’ll just download them and get back up and running! For those who don’t know, the Kodak Gallery is a Flickr-like place where photo-fans can store their memorable pics up in the cloud and share them with family and friends. The service also offers up a very convenient feature that can be found on other photo-sharing services: the ability to order prints. Great, right?
As I logged onto the Kodak Gallery, where more than 1300 of my girlfriends precious memories were stored, I ran into a problem: they weren’t there. They were simply missing. I tweeted out the problem to @KodakCB and @KodakConnect, and to the company’s credit, they connected me with the right customer service people to fix the problem (give these people a raise!). Within 4 days (there was a weekend), the photos were restored.
So why the erasure? Was it some massive data failure? Certainly it was Ragnarok for those servers, right? No, apparently it all comes down to Kodak Gallery’s Terms of Service as of September 25, which state, “Special Note to Members: In order to maintain free storage of your images on the Site, you need to make purchases totaling at least $4.99 or $19.99, depending upon your storage usage, at least once every 12 months. If you do not meet the applicable purchase requirement, your images may be deleted. You should keep a copy of each image you upload in a secure place. We are not responsible for deleted images.”
To prevent any misconception, another tweep informed me that she regularly receives emails from Kodak warning that her photos will be deleted, so it’s not like Kodak erases photos without letting its users know first.
Still, the scary thought that years of photos can be erased because someone didn’t get the memo or didn’t read the TOS, should be troubling to Cloud fans. Tech-geeks undoubtedly use other services such as Flickr or SmugMug, but how many of us read the TOS? For that matter, how many users who are not tech-savvy read the TOS?
In fact, this past week has been one knock after another for believers in the cloud. T-Mobile/Danger/Microsoft’s Sidekick blunder emphasizes that just like our personal devices, cloud data is prone to failure. Whether it be a notice saying “GMail is temporarily un available” or that a number of Facebook accounts are simply inaccessible, this is a rainy day for many who have data stored in the cloud.
Have you had a problem recently with the cloud? Share in the comments!
