Lost photographs and the importance of backing up

I know the place you mean

This is the current thread for the former Wellington Inn in Moreton in Marsh, your photo is not in it

www.airfieldresearchgroup.org.uk/forum/g...lington-inn-ph#97836

The Wellington Inn was finaly sold for conversion to flats in 2012

I know that between 2008 and 2018, photobucket was your, and many others, preferred way of hosting and posting photos on the forum
You still have 1227 posts with photos on this forum with, often multiple photos per post.
If your account on photobucket was to didappear so would those photos

Try this search to see them for yourself
www.airfieldresearchgroup.org.uk/forum/s...hildforums=1&start=0

Early in the forums life it was not capable of properly hosting photos, but the glut of photo hosting sites going belly up or starting to charge serious amounts of money for hosting, or allowing photos to be viewed on "third party sites" like ours forced a change.

One of the particuar difficulties with photobucket was that, fairly obviously, if a photo was deleted from photobucket, it also disappearred from the forum
Similarly if a user stopped or deleted their subscription on photobucket then the photos also disappeared

Less obviously if a user re-organised their photos on photobucket by renaming them or moving them into a new folder or album then the photos disppeared as well
This is because the link from the forum was absolute, ie it referenced the users name, folder and filename as it was first linked

The last set of photobucket service changes a few years ago (2017) when they were taken over and nearly went bust, forced a huge effort on the part of the moderators to save these disappearing photos and host them directly on the forum, it was just not possible to save them all, or move them all over

It may well be that your photo of the Wellington Inn dispappeared in that very fraught time, especialy as there was a good photo of the pub available, locally hosted, in the thread, but it would only have been removed if there was no photo in it from photobucket

There is no policy or program of deleting photos from the forum with the possible exception of when they have no link to airfields, aviation, aviation history or memorials or military architecture

To be clear you should not consider the forum to be a backup for your photos, in any case I suspect that in this case it was simply a way to view photos on photobucket.
Personaly I would not consider photobucket to be a good backup of my photos either

I have to tell you that SD cards and similar semicinductor memory devices are probably the worst possible long term storage medium and should not be considered as a suitable primary or backup device.
It has been found in the Raspberry Pi community that repeated reads and writes eventualy causes the device to fail

If there was ever a priority lockdown project it would be to back up your photos from thiose cards onto something more suitable, preferably twice

I remember that Stevie and I spent some time assistng you to the new method of uploading photos directly to the forum, that seems to be working well, of course those photos are directly hosted on the forum

PETERTHEEATER wrote:

Paul, were those images the Photobucket hosted pix?

I thought that the current method of uploading from the posters PC meant that if the 'original' on the PC is deleted then the image in the post disappears too.

The original should still be on the posters PC in the case of uploading to this forum and the forum retains the upload as a copy.

Yes the photobucket debacle was a nightmare to reclaim lost photos but ultimately photobucket prevented any rescue attempts in the later stages. A similar thing happened in previous years to other well known - then - web hosting sites.

I also checked the backend of the software and could not find those photos either. Sorry.

Jeff

airfields wrote:

. Everytime I put the card into the reader it says; This card is empty, then This card needs Formatting. So I clicked on that and it said; If I do this all memory will be deleted. .

Re-formatting semiconductor memory does not refresh the media to "as new" condition

You are kidding yourself by re-using these failed cards - get a new one

Jeff wrote:

I also checked the backend of the software and could not find those photos either. Sorry.

Jeff

If it was on photobucket then it was never hosted here

.

Get an external hard drive and COPY photos to that but also keep them on a hard drive in your computer. If you take loads of photos possible add a separate hard drive just for photos and then it is easy to copy the lot to the external hard drive.

NOTHING in the computer world lasts for long so as something starts to fail quivckly copy to another drive before it is lost forever. Only use those SD cards for taking phots and NEVER keep them on there. Bitter experience with all storage media since the birth of the home computer has taught me a hard lesson. And has been said already multiple backups are the safest way to go.

Just a thought, but the card readers also get faults so it may be worth trying it in another reader first.