Flickr Restores Mirco Wilhelm's 3,400 Lost Photos | Hacker News Reader

Flickr Restores Mirco Wilhelm's 3,400 Lost Photos

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63 pointssushi10 comments

Sounds like the customer service end of the business didn't talk to the technical side. Since there wasn't a push button functionality for account recovery (and it had probably never even been done before in a quick-and-dirty fashion either) to them it was gone permanently. The photos probably would never have been recovered had this issue not gotten so much attention though. This probably forced the two sides to talk (either an exec said, "Fix this" or someone on the tech side saw the publicity and said, "Wait a minute. It's still recoverable. WTF was that rep talking about?").

Either way, another sign of how things are at Yahoo.

I think that'd be a better argument had they truly not been able to restore the account. I'm pretty sure this type of thing could happen to any company.

Human error in deleting information? Customer service giving out wrong information? Resolution following bad PR? At flickr/yahoo's scale, none of those (individually or combined) strikes me as indicative of anything.

Yeah, my guess is it was actually deleted but because of the PR hoopla they went to tape or did something equivalently time-consuming to recover the data. It's something that wouldn't scale to everyone, but worth a day of someone's time in this particular high profile case.

I also wonder, what would happen if it was a normal customer and not IT involved pro...For sure he would not get his photos back.

That is fairly routine and understandable. Let's talk about a hypothetical SaaS system built on behalf of a large institution -- say, a university -- which does not include an admin accessible undelete feature because features cost money and they struck that one from the spec.

Let's imagine that this purely hypothetical university had a user who accidentally blew away some data. From the perspective of the sysadmin, thtr data is unrecoverable. But data is never really unrecoverable. Data is like oil: if you have enough money, we can drill arbitrarily deep for it.

Let's pretend that the undelete feature would have cost our hypothetical university X. "Drill as deep as you need" might get quoted at 100X or more. And that is totally reasonable, based on the hypothetical costs and benefits of the hypothetical data recovery.

> But data is never really unrecoverable.

I agree with your comment, but this one sentence is sadly not true. Until last summer, Seagate Recovery Services (formerly ActionFront) was a division of the company I work at. Their Canadian lab is still collocated with us. A disk drive I took to them was completely unrecoverable (the head was scraping the platters). Now, partially because I work in the dats protection industry, I had another copy of the data. The point remains that the drive in question is unrecoverable.

I'm also aware of, but have no details on, a customer lawsuit that relates to the customers' missing data where the customer misconfigured their backup. Significant chunks of that data are apparently gone forever, too.

A head crash (assuming that's what you're describing when you say, "the head was scraping the platters") is good example of "it's always recoverable with enough money". For example, if you're really willing to spend money, there are special atomic force microscopes ("magnetic force" microscopes) that actually spin around the platter, which stays still, allowing individual bits to be read off of the disk.

Of course, if the magnetic field is gone then it's certainly possible for it to be truly unrecoverable, but that bar is very very high.

One firm, DriveSavers (which incidentally is who Apple sends all their data recovery problems to), has an ISO-5 cleanroom and maintains a hall-of-fame of ridiculous situations they've successfully recovered: http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/company-info/museum-o...

It could be that the rep was scared to let anyone to know he messed up, so he didn't escalate the issue. Costumer should have asked to be connected with supervisor.

They should've extended his account until 2038. "According to our records, your account expired in 1901. Sorry."

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