Ask Slashdot: Facebook Archiving?

Stenchwarrior writes "I was in the car with my wife and 15-year-old daughter this morning talking about the future of Facebook and how it's likely that they will not be around forever (or at least not at the same capacity as now) and my daughter asked 'Well, what's going to happen to all of my pictures?' It never occurred to her to that Facebook might not be around someday and all of those thousands of photos that she's uploaded might someday be gone. So this is what I ask the good people at Slashdot: What's a good way to preserve all of those memories? Many devices nowadays have direct access to the Internet and even to Facebook and once the images are uploaded they are eventually deleted to make room for more. How do we make sure we can access or backup those files in case Zuckerberg decides to sell out to Google or Microsoft and they do away with everyone's profiles?"

Comments

Re:Download Your Profile

[amicusNYCL]

Pictures: Anyone who does not keep a local copy is an idiot and probably deserves to lose em!

Yeah submitter, that's right, your 15-year old daughter who grew up in the internet age is an idiot who deserves to lose her memories. Thankfully, we have people like Carrot007 to help point this out.

In my day...

[turgid]

In my day, we had our own websites, and we were happy.

We had our own writing, our own art and our own photographs (and source code etc.) and we kept a backup on our own PCs. And we owned the copyright on the stuff that we had created ourselves. We put links to other peoples' web sites that we liked.

These young people today don't know know how easy they have it. And I'll tell you another thing, it's so easy for them, they've never had to think for themselves. And they've never had to take any responsibility.

When it all goes horribly wrong, they'll have nothing left and they won't know what to do, and when someone say, "Well, just restore from your backup." They'll say, "What's a backup?"

And you'll say, "The spare copies of everything that you kept for safe-keeping."

And there will be a look of bewilderment on their faces and they'll say, "I didn't know you could do that..."

Re:Download Your Profile

[wondafucka]

Who even gives a shit about those kinds of things anyway?

And this is why most slashdotters hate facebook. Because they don't understand friendship, or the equivalent stimulation provided by nostalgia of said friendships.

Do you remember the first time you played Doom? How about the first time you compiled a program. It's like that, but with people.

Re:Download Your Profile

[amicusNYCL]

If she grew up in the internet age, she has no excuse not to understand the technology.

That's completely ridiculous. You think that every kid that owns an iPhone understands things like HTTP, iOS, Bluetooth, and the 802.11 specs? Do they also understand database clusters, content delivery networks, event-based user interfaces and load balancing? Should all Facebook users be expected to understand how memcached works?

The point of a device like the iPhone, or a service like Facebook, is explicitly that you do not need to understand how the technology works in order to use it. This is the "black-box" approach to abstract programming that you learn about in year 1 of computer science classes. It's the same reason I can hit a button on a toaster and get toast without needing to know exactly how the coils heat up or the timer works.

I wouldn't say she "deserves" to lose her data, but she really should know better.

No, there is in fact no reason why she should know better. In fact, it's up to the designers of the technology to consider users like her and make their services easier to use and more suited to the needs of users that don't understand how it works. Apple understands this concept. You do not. You may be the guy who designs software and interfaces with the expectation that the kids using the service understand all of the terminology you're using and all of the ramifications involved. That's how you alienate your prospective user base. Facebook makes it easy to upload pictures, they should also make it easy to download them. It would be nice if you could download the original version, but that's asking a bit much for a social networking site instead of an image dump.