lutr

Haha, that's fair! You know how it is – I'm not mad, just disappointed :P

I self-host Immich on a personal home server. I do pay for backups, though. For 65GB of images (not a lot) I pay ~$1/mo to Backblaze. The backed-up data is 30% bigger in size right now (= 82GB), as it's incremental.

This is 100% true.

I also lost all my old Yahoo accounts because I didn't log into them for >1 year. Same for a lot of videos I made on a nice little site called GoAnimate. So keeping data is better than removing it! Even charging a fee feels fair-ish.

But forcing me to sign up for a subscription on an account I don't actually even have any data? Weeeelll, this doesn't feel so nice :)

Yes. I don't think I'd uploaded anything on that specific account that I recovered.

Haha, that's fair! I wrote the post because I thought it was actually kinda funny. And when I found out the account was empty, I did stop the subscription. But I guess I didn't realize in time that I could go even further and request a refund. Not really a refund kind of person :P.

Yes, I'm at fault here with missing the e-mails. The Photobucket account was registered using an old e-mail address that I was using as a kid. I happened to find the account by accident, by scrolling through my password manager.

So these are the unfortunate circumstances. This post basically shows what's it like to be a living and breathing edge-case (missed e-mails & no images in your account).

This actually made me think about the edge-cases I must have shipped at work and how they're affecting people.

Yes, that's exactly it! I must have had multiple accounts. I don't think they deleted any of my images.

That's exactly it! And the saying fits so well here, in the literal sense too!

Agreed! I'd (sadly) pay more than $5 to recover some childhood memories that some services have deleted instead. Not $5/mo, though (I hate that part too).

To be fair I'm doing that now, with Immich (= a "self-hosted Google Photos"). I was just curious to find out what things I was screnshotting as a kid.

Life really is a series of xkcds, it turns out!

Would be a nice part 2 :P. But I've already had enough with this "side mission". Maybe I'll try a charge back and see if that works, though.

100%!!

In fact I'm also using Immich and it's amazing! It's as good as the Google Photos app, but you own your data and can more cheaply upgrade your storage, if needed.

On that old Photobucket account I was hoping to find screenshots I made as a kid. Didn't store actual photos there, thankfully.

Huh, never did a charge back in my life (I'm not from the US, charge backs aren't a big thing here). I'll give it a shot, just for fun :).

I use a debit card and I wasn't even sure you can do charge backs with them. But yes, apparently!

They must have sent them to me too. However, the Photobucket account was registered using an e-mail address I no longer use. I found the account by accident, by scrolling through my password manager.

The e-mail account was fully emptied after 1 year of inactivity (with warnings and what not, to other addresses I stopped using). So Photobucket was way nicer than Yahoo from this point of view!

It's true, doing things carefully can avoid a ton of problems in life. I guess I wasn't expecting to have to use my full attention for a little "side mission".

And I'd already made peace with losing those $5. "It's time to relive them for just $5" didn't really sound like you can get them back, in my defense.

Ah, no, by "childhood memories" I meant like whatever I was screnshotting as a kid. Believe it or not, but finding old screenshots like 10 years later is sooo sweet!

For my actual chilhood photos, I'm using a little self-hosted Immich that's nicely backed up as well. Hoping that doesn't get hacked!

If it was just that, I'd be okay-ish with it (even though it started out as a service). But pushing a monthly subscription for a 1-time action? Man.....

Yeah, makes sense. I think it's just a little honeypot for fools that don't do their research. 1 prompt to Claude would have saved me the pain, probably. ("Research" isn't even that hard nowadays!)

Yeah. To be fair I'm not that mad about it. It was a very poetic moment that I'll forever cherish...

Right?? I mean again, I could have gotten a refund in 48 hours, per the smallprint... But I noticed it about ~3 months too late, while writing about this.

But it's okay. Getting those $5 back would make Photobucket look slightly better in my mind, and I don't want that.

Well... If I was smarter, I'd have definitely done that!