6 ms·

It literally only has been 1 hour since OP posted that thread. I agree with all the points about having backups and/or using better service/self host etc., but

It literally only has been 1 hour since OP posted that thread. I agree with all the points about having backups and/or using better service/self host etc., but IMO it's too early to conclude anything about this incident.

owlninja 4y ago
And a follow-up will likely not make the front page.
EdwardDiego 4y ago
I'd be freaking the fuck out too, tbh. These days you tend to get better support from the megacorps if you tweet or post on HN, it can bypass the obligatory outsourced support layer.
- thrdbndndn 4y ago
  Oh I totally agree. I do wish I have such luck when posting on HN though, often ended up with zero upvotes and no replies.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    The stories that get helped often start with the premise that a company has destroyed the person's life/business and the company is hated by a large portion of people here. That will get the most upvotes, visibility, and sometimes a company will reach out.
    - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
      Bitcoin just ate all my cat videos! But they were backed up to Ethereum, but Ethereum might be declared a security, so they'll be gone too! At least I've also got them on XRP.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  It might be true about some other big tech companies but AMZN is exceptionally obstinate.
  - onphonenow 4y ago
    I’ve had good support experiences at amazon actually
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      I have too, but when they have a bad policy they’ll defend it to death. Specifically I contacted them about a product listing that, at best, was word salad right out of Blueler’s book on schizophrenia. They told me they didn’t want to hear any complaints unless I’d bought the product. Of course, that kind of listing is endemic on AMZN, and I’d have no problem reporting several of those each time I go shopping. Actions have consequences though and AMZN is now the last place I look when shopping for things since shopping there is somewhere between visiting Mariupol and the South Bronx in the 1970s. It is a matter of time before I pay my last recurring bill of any kind to them.
      - derefr 4y ago
        > They told me they didn’t want to hear any complaints unless I’d bought the product. You have to think about the game-theoretic equilibrium of the alternative, given the same set of bad actors involved: if you could report listings you hadn't bought, then these idiots would all just be constantly reporting their product-category brand-name competitors' listings, as non-suspicious one-off actions from different dark-web-purchased pre-aged accounts, to the point that Amazon would just have to ignore "reported listings" as a signal anyway.
        masfuerte 4y ago
        Or Amazon could pay someone to review reported listings. This kind of DoS only works if the system fails to distinguish good listings from bad.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Maybe, but somehow I don't see them rushing in to spare the blushes of the Amazon Photos product team. Now if this were an S3 cloud bucket.....
akho 4y ago
So they might still get their photos back. 240,364 photos is a lot, and none are replaceable. It’s still a lot of stress.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- prmoustache 4y ago
  who would rely on only one vendor and repo for his data?
  - akho 4y ago
    Everybody but you and I, that’s who.
  - unxdfa 4y ago
    Smells like everyone in github I got told I was insane for backing up github. I clone all our github repos daily, zip them up and stuff them in S3
    - jefftk 4y ago
      At least for code, git being distributed means that there's always multiple copies with typical workflows. For example, in addition to the copy on GitHub whoever pushed last should have a completely current copy. And everyone else working with the repo should have something pretty current.
      - unxdfa 4y ago
        We have 643 git repos. I'm not sure we could reconstruct all of those by going round 300 engineers' machines...
        ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        Exactly, its a fantasy Our company has thousands of repos, some of them years old.
unxdfa 4y ago
Knowing Amazon retail / services support, their data is gone and they'll be lucky if they raise anyone at all. If you pay $15k a month for AWS enterprise support, you will find someone who may or may not be able to help you within 6 months after misinterpreting the problem and having to raise your account manager and wave your hands around.
- krzyk 4y ago
  I'm surprised, Amazon is well known of having the best in class customer support for their store (I mean: "Customer: My kindle broke, because I sat on it. Amazon: no worries, let me send you a replacement, no need to send back the old kindle" level of good support) - oh and human support, not google botocracy.
  - Mindwipe 4y ago
    They are for retail, not for services.
  - unxdfa 4y ago
    Have you tried getting through to a human recently on Amazon retail support? It's quite difficult. First you have to negotiate with a bot with an IQ and service level of an angry wasp, then you get filtered through to someone who usually can't help. So you have to try 2-3 times to get stuff sorted. The whole thing is designed to put people off and make it difficult to get problems resolved. I'm fairly good at being annoyed enough to work around this but most people out there can't handle things like that easily and Amazon knows it.
    - krzyk 4y ago
      It depends on "recently". I contacted them (human, right away, speaking my language - I'm in EU and the store was in different country than mine) about a year or two ago where I had issue with my phone, and there was no issue to get my money back (Pixel 4 had issue with NFC not working correctly) - no "We will repair it", like any other retail store I used.
hbn 4y ago
The point of these services is they're supposed to be an easy-to-use, worry-free photo backup. Amazon/Google/Apple should surely have the resources available to keep my photos stored somewhere with some redundancy. I don't want to worry about how they do it, but that's the idea. In exchange they're probably training image recognition algorithms or what have you on my photos, and I certainly wouldn't keep anything too personal on those services (i.e. nudes). I may even be paying them for more than the free storage limit. The least they can do is be a reliable backup. Yahoo Mail doesn't disappear emails randomly, YouTube doesn't just disappear videos randomly (barring stupid robot moderation). You'd expect the same for your photos on these services.
- zigzag312 4y ago
  I agree. One selling point of cloud services is that technical details, like backup, are managed for you.
- brokenmachine 4y ago
  >YouTube doesn't just disappear videos randomly My experience couldn't be further from that. When I look through my "Watch Later" list, probably 10% of videos are missing. I think you have to choose "show deleted". I've been planning to set up a script that uses yt-dlp to auto-download the new videos on my Watch Later list every night, but haven't got around to it yet.
caeril 4y ago
It's also highly suspect. 240k photos is 66 photos per day, every day, over a full decade. If you're spending time taking 66 photos a day, I think you have bigger (personal) issues to contend with than your image storage solution. Even on vacation, relaxing, with my kids and wife, visiting all manner of picturesque spots, 66 photos would be an enormous feat of narcissism. The author is either lying about the photo library size to garner sympathy, or has a gargantuan psychological issue to address.
- cnick 4y ago
  In macro photography, taking an extreme closeup of something like an insect necessarily has a very, very thin depth of field due to its high magnification. To get the entire insect in focus, you use a technique called focus stacking where the focus changes by tiny fractions of a millimeter on each exposure. You can literally take 100 to 200 of pictures for one subject. If I do 10 of these in a day, I've reached one percent of OPs forever photo volume. https://www.photography-raw.com/creating-stunning-macro-photography-of-insects/ https://www.photography-raw.com/creating-stunning-macro-phot... Time lapse photography is taking a photo every X seconds/minutes/days. If you want the video to look smooth, you need 24-30 shots per second, so a 30 second video has 720 exposures. So again, failed three time lapse attempts and I'm at 1% of OPs forever exposure count. There's an awful lot of judgment in your comment, and the issue certainly seems like a lack of understanding on your part, rather than OP's "psychological issue" or "lying." I'll refrain from my own judgements, and suggest you watch David Foster Wallace's "This is Water," and when you're done, please watch it again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7xzavzEKY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7xzavzEKY

owlninja 4y ago

And a follow-up will likely not make the front page.

EdwardDiego 4y ago

I'd be freaking the fuck out too, tbh. These days you tend to get better support from the megacorps if you tweet or post on HN, it can bypass the obligatory outsourced support layer.

thrdbndndn 4y ago
Oh I totally agree. I do wish I have such luck when posting on HN though, often ended up with zero upvotes and no replies.
- themitigating 4y ago
  The stories that get helped often start with the premise that a company has destroyed the person's life/business and the company is hated by a large portion of people here. That will get the most upvotes, visibility, and sometimes a company will reach out.
  - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
    Bitcoin just ate all my cat videos! But they were backed up to Ethereum, but Ethereum might be declared a security, so they'll be gone too! At least I've also got them on XRP.
PaulHoule 4y ago
It might be true about some other big tech companies but AMZN is exceptionally obstinate.
- onphonenow 4y ago
  I’ve had good support experiences at amazon actually
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    I have too, but when they have a bad policy they’ll defend it to death. Specifically I contacted them about a product listing that, at best, was word salad right out of Blueler’s book on schizophrenia. They told me they didn’t want to hear any complaints unless I’d bought the product. Of course, that kind of listing is endemic on AMZN, and I’d have no problem reporting several of those each time I go shopping. Actions have consequences though and AMZN is now the last place I look when shopping for things since shopping there is somewhere between visiting Mariupol and the South Bronx in the 1970s. It is a matter of time before I pay my last recurring bill of any kind to them.
    - derefr 4y ago
      > They told me they didn’t want to hear any complaints unless I’d bought the product. You have to think about the game-theoretic equilibrium of the alternative, given the same set of bad actors involved: if you could report listings you hadn't bought, then these idiots would all just be constantly reporting their product-category brand-name competitors' listings, as non-suspicious one-off actions from different dark-web-purchased pre-aged accounts, to the point that Amazon would just have to ignore "reported listings" as a signal anyway.
      - masfuerte 4y ago
        Or Amazon could pay someone to review reported listings. This kind of DoS only works if the system fails to distinguish good listings from bad.
rchaud 4y ago
Maybe, but somehow I don't see them rushing in to spare the blushes of the Amazon Photos product team. Now if this were an S3 cloud bucket.....

akho 4y ago

So they might still get their photos back. 240,364 photos is a lot, and none are replaceable. It’s still a lot of stress.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
prmoustache 4y ago
who would rely on only one vendor and repo for his data?
- akho 4y ago
  Everybody but you and I, that’s who.
- unxdfa 4y ago
  Smells like everyone in github I got told I was insane for backing up github. I clone all our github repos daily, zip them up and stuff them in S3
  - jefftk 4y ago
    At least for code, git being distributed means that there's always multiple copies with typical workflows. For example, in addition to the copy on GitHub whoever pushed last should have a completely current copy. And everyone else working with the repo should have something pretty current.
    - unxdfa 4y ago
      We have 643 git repos. I'm not sure we could reconstruct all of those by going round 300 engineers' machines...
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        Exactly, its a fantasy Our company has thousands of repos, some of them years old.

unxdfa 4y ago

Knowing Amazon retail / services support, their data is gone and they'll be lucky if they raise anyone at all. If you pay $15k a month for AWS enterprise support, you will find someone who may or may not be able to help you within 6 months after misinterpreting the problem and having to raise your account manager and wave your hands around.

krzyk 4y ago
I'm surprised, Amazon is well known of having the best in class customer support for their store (I mean: "Customer: My kindle broke, because I sat on it. Amazon: no worries, let me send you a replacement, no need to send back the old kindle" level of good support) - oh and human support, not google botocracy.
- Mindwipe 4y ago
  They are for retail, not for services.
- unxdfa 4y ago
  Have you tried getting through to a human recently on Amazon retail support? It's quite difficult. First you have to negotiate with a bot with an IQ and service level of an angry wasp, then you get filtered through to someone who usually can't help. So you have to try 2-3 times to get stuff sorted. The whole thing is designed to put people off and make it difficult to get problems resolved. I'm fairly good at being annoyed enough to work around this but most people out there can't handle things like that easily and Amazon knows it.
  - krzyk 4y ago
    It depends on "recently". I contacted them (human, right away, speaking my language - I'm in EU and the store was in different country than mine) about a year or two ago where I had issue with my phone, and there was no issue to get my money back (Pixel 4 had issue with NFC not working correctly) - no "We will repair it", like any other retail store I used.

hbn 4y ago

The point of these services is they're supposed to be an easy-to-use, worry-free photo backup. Amazon/Google/Apple should surely have the resources available to keep my photos stored somewhere with some redundancy. I don't want to worry about how they do it, but that's the idea. In exchange they're probably training image recognition algorithms or what have you on my photos, and I certainly wouldn't keep anything too personal on those services (i.e. nudes). I may even be paying them for more than the free storage limit. The least they can do is be a reliable backup. Yahoo Mail doesn't disappear emails randomly, YouTube doesn't just disappear videos randomly (barring stupid robot moderation). You'd expect the same for your photos on these services.

zigzag312 4y ago
I agree. One selling point of cloud services is that technical details, like backup, are managed for you.
brokenmachine 4y ago
>YouTube doesn't just disappear videos randomly My experience couldn't be further from that. When I look through my "Watch Later" list, probably 10% of videos are missing. I think you have to choose "show deleted". I've been planning to set up a script that uses yt-dlp to auto-download the new videos on my Watch Later list every night, but haven't got around to it yet.

caeril 4y ago

It's also highly suspect. 240k photos is 66 photos per day, every day, over a full decade. If you're spending time taking 66 photos a day, I think you have bigger (personal) issues to contend with than your image storage solution. Even on vacation, relaxing, with my kids and wife, visiting all manner of picturesque spots, 66 photos would be an enormous feat of narcissism. The author is either lying about the photo library size to garner sympathy, or has a gargantuan psychological issue to address.

cnick 4y ago
In macro photography, taking an extreme closeup of something like an insect necessarily has a very, very thin depth of field due to its high magnification. To get the entire insect in focus, you use a technique called focus stacking where the focus changes by tiny fractions of a millimeter on each exposure. You can literally take 100 to 200 of pictures for one subject. If I do 10 of these in a day, I've reached one percent of OPs forever photo volume. https://www.photography-raw.com/creating-stunning-macro-photography-of-insects/ https://www.photography-raw.com/creating-stunning-macro-phot... Time lapse photography is taking a photo every X seconds/minutes/days. If you want the video to look smooth, you need 24-30 shots per second, so a 30 second video has 720 exposures. So again, failed three time lapse attempts and I'm at 1% of OPs forever exposure count. There's an awful lot of judgment in your comment, and the issue certainly seems like a lack of understanding on your part, rather than OP's "psychological issue" or "lying." I'll refrain from my own judgements, and suggest you watch David Foster Wallace's "This is Water," and when you're done, please watch it again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7xzavzEKY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7xzavzEKY