Photographers Direct lost photos

Canon EF 24-105mm f/4.0L IS

12/23/2009 12:23:41 AM · #1

I'm very surprised that no one has posted anything about this. I can't be the only one who has photos on Photographers Direct...well about a week ago one of their servers crashed and they lost tens of millions of photos...notice I didn't say hundreds or thousands...but TENS of MILLIONS of photos. I've been with them for several years now and all of my photos were gone for a while. They have been able to recover less than half of my photos. I actually received a notice that many of my photos are gone and tha I need to reload all of them. Which means I need to go and find the CD's and find which photos I actually had on the site and reload them all......5 at a time!!!! Hundreds of photos..5 at a time...I don't have that sort of motivation anymore.

Anyone else lose that many photos? You would think that websites like these would have multiple servers so if one is down, they could be running off another. How is it that a server goes down and millions of photos are lost?

scalvert

Canon EOS-5D Mark III

12/23/2009 12:36:00 AM · #2

This is the first I've heard of an outage, and I haven't received any emails from them. I only had a few dozen images on PD, but they all appear to be intact.

12/23/2009 12:47:13 AM · #3

I saw that they recovered about 1.6 Million photos....here is the message I received on my account.

"IMPORTANT NOTICE: Following a server failure we have been restoring all images. This has been over 90% successful but it seems some images have been lost permanently and we believe this effects your account. You may find images numbered higher than pd1420000 have not been restored.

If you find a small number of images are not viewable:
You can upload them again. You can use the 'overwrite' tick box at the bottom of the upload page. Titles and keywords do not need to be included as they will still be in the database. They will still be attached to old requests, and they will still be in your Portfolios.

If you find a large number of images are not viewable:
We can set up ftp access for you to do a bulk upload. Again, you just need to upload the low res image files as all titles and keywords are already in the database. If I have not contacted you about ftp access, email chrisbarton@photographersdirect.com and I will set it up for you.

We are really sorry for the inconvenience, but we have learned from this failure and will be implementing another faster and better backup for the image servers."

Nikon AF-S Nikkor 28-300mm f3.5-5.6G ED VR

12/23/2009 12:51:56 AM · #4

Actually...now that I think about it...They are lying about it being 90% successful. If they have not restored images higher than 1420000...and i have images up to 2571978...that means there are at least 1151978 images that have not been restored...and I'm sure I wasn't the last person to upload images...that's almost half the images were not restored. half...is only 50%

NikonJeb

Nikon D850

12/23/2009 08:31:54 AM · #5

Originally posted by albc28:

I actually received a notice that many of my photos are gone and tha I need to reload all of them. Which means I need to go and find the CD's and find which photos I actually had on the site and reload them all......5 at a time!!!! Hundreds of photos..5 at a time...I don't have that sort of motivation anymore.

Wow!

That's going to take a while!

How much are they compensating you for your time since this was their error?

Or will they just pay you for the images?

cpanaioti

Canon EOS-40D

Canon EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 DO IS USM

12/23/2009 08:40:28 AM · #6

Originally posted by albc28:

I would read their response that some images above the number quoted could not be restored. It did not say all so I doubt they're lying about anything. Did you actually check whether your images above that number were still missing?

No, I don't work for PD or have any affiliation with them. I work in IT and it's not an all or nothing situation. Just because an image has a certain number doesn't mean it was save in the area of a disk that could not be restored.

kleski

Canon EOS-7D

Canon EF 28-135mm F/3.5-5.6 IS USM

12/23/2009 09:04:18 AM · #7

Have you actually contacted them about this or have you just received an email?

pineapple

Canon EOS-5D

Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM

12/23/2009 09:55:02 AM · #8

A month or more back a database server at pBase went down and when it came up the Oracle database was corrupted. However, they did manage to make the repair and although down for a week or so no files were lost. pBase was running under-powered with regard to the database server/s. One could tell by the age it took for files to load just prior to the event. Not sure what system PD is using, but they should be able to repair it, unless they are running without backups and without suitable redundancy. Looks like PD is an MS solution ;-)

Message edited by author 2009-12-23 09:59:11.

PHOTOKID

12/23/2009 10:07:26 AM · #9

I had just started upload to them as well, I had 5 photos up and they are all gone =(