This is why I hate digital archives

Everyone tells me I should put all my CDs on my backup drive but it just always seems too risky to me. I was notified today that all but 200 of the photos by my late sister have disappeared from Flickr -- I spent a couple months scanning them from slides, identifying them, organizing them and posting them to Flickr so all her friends could see what a photographer she was.

Now approximately 4,800 of them have disappeared.

And I can't find a contact address on Flickr to ask what happened.

Awww, NoCo! Oh, I hate to hear that!

I have to say I do multiples of things. While I have a lot of photos on Photobucket I also keep a copy on a USB drive. I use Flicker some. Mainly because of the DU group. But always keep digital copies.

I try to be philosophical. It is my tendency to be a keeper of things, an archivist -- a hoarder. Mrs. NoCo is trying to reform me. "Nobody cares" is her reasoning.

And it's true. I hadn't noticed my sister's pics disappeared until somebody pointed it out. I think everybody who was going to look at them already had.

Time to move on. Nobody cares.

Well, that sucks big time, NoCo. Do you still have all of the original source? The slides and prints?
I've scanned and repaired slides and prints, some nearly a hundred years old, and I know what a hassle it is.
I am a fiend for backup, though. I have an always-connected external drive that is used for backup, and I also attach spare drives and clone the drives in the computer from time to time. It may be a bit of an overkill, but all of the time I spend on that is trivial to what it would take to reconstruct just one drive. Hard drives are so damn cheap today that no one should ever suffer from the lack of backup.
If you ever get things straightened out with Flickr, I would love to see some of your sister's work.