WHO: Jim and James, the guys who came up with HOT or NOT
WHERE: Yafro crash message page
FULL TEXT: “Dear Yafro Users,
We’re terribly sorry to report that the main picture hard drive crashed on us a few days ago, and it’s quite possible that all pictures uploaded to Yafro via web browser over the last month and a half may be gone. (we should be able to recover cameraphone pictures over the next 2 days because those are archived separately)
We are working on getting the pictures back
Many of you we’ve talked to have said that we shouldn’t feel too bad about this since we don’t charge anything for Yafro and it costs us so much to run, but the truth is that we lost some of our own pictures too, and we know how much this stinks. We sincerely hope that everyone has backup copies of the pictures they uploaded. We are in the process of sending the drive to a hard drive recovery service, which believe it or not will cost almost $20,000!! So believe us when we say we are doing everything we can to get the pictures back. We want them just as much as you do.
What happened, and why it won’t happen again
We bought multiple sets of 800 GB storage for Yafro. One set was supposed to be backing the other up, but it turns out that due to a late night programming error made in early August, the backing up was turned off!! If it had been left on, we’d have a copy of everything and there wouldn’t be any problems. You can be sure that after spending $20,000 trying to recover your pictures, we aren’t going to make this mistake again!
This doesn’t affect HOTorNOT in any way
Some people have asked if HOTorNOT is affected. The answer is no, HOTorNOT runs on entirely different machines in an entirely different facility. HOTorNOT also has much higher levels of backup and redundancy.
When will we know if the pictures are able to be brought back?
We’ll update this page.. Obviously, if they all of a sudden appear, you’ll know too 😊 It’s also possible that they might only be able to recover some of the pictures but not all.
Our sincerest apologies, we know you trust us with your pictures, and in return for that trust we are responsible for doing the best job we can, whether Yafro is free or not. We messed up and are very sorry, and hope you’ll continue to enjoy using Yafro in the future (with backups turned ON!)
-Jim and James”
posted at 9:13 pm
on Sep. 26, 2004
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