All my old PIP images show broken link symbol (Page 1/1)
seajai SEP 26, 10:42 PM
Started a build thread back in 2012. By now most of the pics I posted show a broken link symbol so I thought I'd go through and fix it. After a little digging I remembered I used PIP to upload most of my pictures, and those are the ones that are missing.
Did something happen to PIP at some point that all my pics are gone? Is there any way to retrieve them? I bought a new laptop a few years ago and installed PIP on it but that doesn't give me access to what I had on my old computer. I'm not sure I even have all of the pics from the build anymore.

[This message has been edited by seajai (edited 09-26-2023).]

Patrick SEP 26, 11:56 PM
Read 'em and weep.

Probably the most relevant post is this one...


quote
Originally posted by Cliff Pennock Here:

The problem is as follows:

The hosting company where the (image) server was hosted, was sold to another party. According to isthiswhereiputausername, the new guys are a bunch of morons. During migration, they "acidentally" deleted everything on the server (I'm guessing this was a shared server and they simply repurposed it). So far, they have been less than willing to cooperate restoring from a backup.

I have emailed isthiswhereiputausername and asked him if I could help putting these guys under pressure. I'm pretty sure they can be held liable for losing all that data.

Other than that, I have a partial backup myself which I already restored. I was actually meaning to backup the rest of the images, but never got around to it since, well, life got in the way. I also didn't give it a very high priority because my own experience with hosting companies is that they simply don't lose your data. I never expected to encounter one who does and is even unwilling to cooperate after they did.

So will we ever see those images again? I really don't know. It sucks big time because I've always stressed how important it was to upload the images to PFF's image server so they would never get lost. And yet, here we are.

So how many images are we talking about? I'm not entirely sure, but between 40,000 - 100,000. I will try to write a script that will go through all threads on the forum and mark any missing image. That should give me a better idea.


[This message has been edited by Patrick (edited 09-27-2023).]

seajai OCT 09, 08:47 PM
Found a flash drive with project pictures on it. Spent a few hours and was able to get most of the missing images restored in my build thread.
Cliff Pennock OCT 10, 04:49 AM
That's awesome!