Slashdot Mirror
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?"
The simple answer to your question would be this.
You can get an entire compilation of every picture, post and conversation your account has had. Emails you a zip file in about 20 minutes
Facebook already has a export feature. Just export and store
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Theyre already gone. All you can do now is download the shitty low res copies facebook keeps
TIAEAE!
I don't understand this article is called 'Facebook Archiving'... Backup is backup whatever you look at it, in this case, you're backing up photographs...They're not *Facebook photographs*, they're just photographs, perhaps ordinary JPGS.
If you want to backup your 'status updates', install Status Net or some twitter clone, then make updates locally with your tool, then get those to sync with twitter and then Facebook...
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
There are already a few third-party (for a fee) options out there, or if you have firefox, perhaps this add on for it may do the job for you.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Back them up on MySpace
No panic, all her better pictures are archived on 4chan.
Trolling is a art,
this video shows you all about it, you don't need to be logged in or even have an account to see it.
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150292657680484
If Facebook should go out of business, all of your photos and personal data will be sold to the highest bidder. I'm sure that ACME advertising would love to archive it for you.
It's time for your daughter to realize that her (and our) personal information are what constitutes Facebook's most valuable assets.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
If you have something hosted online, you should always have an offline backup. Look at the gmail account deletion a couple of days ago. Always trust yourself above the web and get a Terabyte hard drive and keep all the pics you want on there as well as on Facebook. You can get one for around $100 bucks and store all the pictures you want to keep.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. -- Isaac Asimov
There's nothing to worry about. Facebook is too big to fail!
Um, store the original files locally? Any good photos I have are going to be stored on my computer and backed up. Anything I post to Facebook is a low-res copy. Who cares about the wall. If you just have to keep it all in the cloud, use a service designed to store your pics and maybe even pay them something.
that you're asking that question at all is just fail
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
Isn't that what this site is for?
http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
I should probably provide an (indirect) answer as I did not answer your question, If you're looking for backup software (which you are), these will probably be a goldmine for ideas:
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Backupify (disclosure: I work there) does automated facebook archiving as well as other services. There are many ways to lose data, so more redundancy is usually a win.
http://www.backupify.com/ "Backupify is an all-in-one archiving, search and restore service for the most popular online services including Google Apps, Facebook, Twitter, Picasa and more." There's probably other service like that.
Same way with most of your sites... something like:
wget -r -l 2 -p -k --load-profile [path to your mozilla profile for cookies and passwords] http://facebook.com/
Play with the -l and --accept and --reject to filter out stuff you don't want... unfortunately facebook's undescripted URL format will make this difficult. But wget works quite well to backup your other blog sites, like livejournal, blogspot, and slashdot.
As for myself, I only ever post to facebook via twitter (which also crossposts to buzz and livejournal). There's actually no real content that I post to Facebook directly, I just use it as yet another form of 2-way rss.
Why would you want to remember every post and every tweet and every picture? Its a DAMN good things that there is data loss at least for the mundane. I don't want people seeing everything I first posted when I from my first websites and my first forays into the web. LET IT DIE ALREADY YOU FRIGGIN INTERNET VAMPIRES!
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
...maybe should have gone AC there
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
I use Picasa instead of FB for photos.
1) I trust the longevity more. Feel free to disagree.
2) I can upload full resolution images.
3) My friends can download full albums of full resolution images if I've set privacy settings accordingly.
When people post images on FB, I'm always bummed that I can't backup the high quality image myself, and these days people seem to email around photo backups of events far less, and simply tag people on Facebook.
As far as backing up: I have everything important at full res in Picasa, in the cloud, I have them on my computer HD, my iPhone syncs full resolution copies daily, and I keep a regular external HD backup. That all seems pretty safe to me, especially compared to simply expecting FB to keep the sole copy forever.
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
First, when you uploaded it you must have had the original, why didn't you save it?
Second, contact Facebook as an advertiser and/or marketeer and they will hand you anything you want (for a price).
Third, ask your favourite 3- or 4 letter agency for info on terrist X...
And lastly, when you wake up from the stupor that made you place all that personal info on Facebook you will find it's impossible to remove what got out on the net :(
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Buy a new one every 3 years for $100 and put all your crap on it.
br. Even better, buy two and keep one in a storage bin or at a relatives in case of a fire or something.
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?
Just use Google Buzz instead, Google already owns that.
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
The short answer is that you treat Facebook, Flickr, and other sites just like you did back in the Good Old Days--as a means of sharing, not as a means of storage. It's fine to upload and share the photos immediately, but you leave them on your device until you dock the device and download them all (in native resolution) to your computer. Then you can remove delete them from the device.
Sent from my iPhone
If google or microsoft buys facebook, it's because they want the users. They'll either keep the system, or migrate the user data to their own systems. It's fucking stupid to think they wouldn't. This is another great example of slashdot approving a worthless story with no merit.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
You weren't around during the 00's were you? That time when companies invested billions into their infrastructure and technology only the become irrelevant husks with stock valued at fractions of a percent of their high.
You are probably right that Facebook will be around for a while (for some definition of a while), but it's not because they're building a data center.
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..."
Stick Men
How do we make sure we can access or backup those files in case Zuckerberg decides to sell out to Google or Microsoft
Wow. Are there really still people who think this is the worst that can happen with Facebook?
Breakfast served all day!
YOUR ENTIRE POST
What the fuck are you talking about?
Just send a FOIA request to NSA or DHS, I'm sure they will keep a backup of all photos, tags, friend relations and pretty much everything else.
You forgot a couple.
D) Semi-reliable, always connected hardware to run it on.*
E) Semi-reliable, fairly-fast, connection to run it through.**
F) Sufficient, reliable income to afford a commercial DSL or better internet connection because hosting such a site over most residential plans is a violation of TOS.***
G) Having D & E talk to each other without any router in between or understanding UPnP well enough to get around this.
H) A semi-static IP address AND enough know-how to make it visible "out there".**
I) For your typical 15-year-old (the user in the OP), permission from your parents to use A, B, C, D, E, F & G for this scheme.
* Laptop/netbook/tablet anyone?
** So, not cellular-based, or satellite, or...
***This isn't likely to get you booted off the plan or anything. But, many providers (I'm looking at you TWC) tend to block the common incoming ports for such services, making the setup that much harder.
10x Blu-Ray burners are down to 89 bucks. 12x for 99. Discs are under $3 each. Burn the pics to bd-r discs; that's what I do.
Just get listed as a suspect in a child porn ring, let the FBI do your dirty work for you.
The Foundation:
http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/
The Debian Project Page:
http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
This is a more long-term solution, but think of it as the elegant solution to the problem.
coding is life
Backupify.com is a great way to back up your Facebook account in the cloud (along with Twitter, Picasa, Google Calendar, Google Docs, etc.). You can use the promo code savegmail to get 20 GB of storage free for a whole year.
+1
If you're a reader of slashdot, I'm sure you're aware how far a couple of hard drives (internal and external) and off-site storage will go. Tell her to start copying them to a hard drive, upload them to Facebook, but don't delete them. Start this now and then tell her to go back and download her profile as someone in the thread already mentioned. Simple, really, unless I'm missing something in the question.
In the same vein your daughter's question, what about all the meta data attached to the posted picture itself? For example, everyone that is tagged in the photo, the caption of the photo, and the comments that went along with it. Yes, I would rather want the photo than the extraneous information, but I'm sure someday I'm going to have trouble some people are in those images..
I wish.
I'm more worried nothing will be deleted -- ever.
He said Facebook is a symptom of the overpopulation problem and is killing babies.
Or... something.
This is what I hope a peer to peer social network could solve.
You'd be able to choose a host for your, uh, seed so there's some risk gone. But you could also sync your stuff to an encrypted vault with a few friends, and return the favor to them. That's pretty reliable. And then you could export the archive into a format that lots of people could unpack and use, because there's the original open source manager, and perhaps a bunch of alternatives/competitors using the same protocol like you see with bitTorrent clients.
It's not just about the network of your peers and privacy. It's also owning your lifestream in a format that's still useful five years from now. From there, building out management of a home library is pretty natural, even if it's never shared across the network. I lost almost all of my early journalistic work when my Hotmail account got wiped due to inactivity. That's hard to replace. A consolidated service to both store and share information could be really powerful and universally liked. Facebook is a reasonably effective start at this... but with some inextricable baggage around privacy, ownership and portability.
Diaspora, despite the rocky start, seems to be the most active project working on this. I hope it thrives.
My VPS costs me less than $20 a month at Linode. I run my blog and several other sites off of it. Less full-featured hosting is available even more cheaply. Why would I buy my own hardware to run a web server?
I have FaceBook pick up my RSS feed. My FB "friends" can read my posts there, but if FB collapses I still have my content.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
http://sourceforge.net/projects/flickrdown/
I used this a few years ago. worked great. for those who are on flickr, this would be one way to get your photos 'back'.
I see that flickr has banned this software now, though ;( what a shame.
when I had a 'pro' flickr account, I could see all my photos. when I let that expire and go to a free account again, I'm limited to seeing only the last 200 photos even though they were all still there if you knew the url.
so, as my account was about to expire, I ran flickrdown and grabbed the thousands of photos I had uploaded since I started. I did have backups of the originals but they are scattered all over my drives, sadly. getting them all in once place at one time was a nice luxury.
pity flickr banned this. yet another reason I refuse to buy a pro subscr. from flickr ever again. I'll use their free service but they are not worth supporting and if/when they go away, I'll simply go to the next photo host that is in vogue.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The first thing wrong is that Facebook doesn't have any liability to YOU to keep the information you uploaded online and/or archived. And YOU, expecting Facebook to keep a backup is just moronic. If you upload a photo directly from your cell phone to Facebook, YOU as a Facebook user can't have any reasonable expectation that the photo will stay there, be backed up, or basically anything. It can stay there, it can be taken down, it can disappear without any notice, and if it's published to the public you can't have any expectation that the photo will not be used/copied/shared/drooled on by others that you don't want to have access. The only one responsible for the well being of that photo is YOU, and if you don't save it elsewhere on your own, then you really shouldn't own a cell phone that can take pictures anyhow.
The GP was talking about setting up XAMPP and installing software. I took that to mean a home-server.
About Linode, are you happy with them? I'm thinking about changing hosts for my personal stuff and am starting to research alternatives. If you don't mind, I'll email you some specific questions.
Aren't you uploading the pictures from your PC? Why aren't you keeping copies on your PC? You should be backing them up from there...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
So forget they even exist until their demise is announced on /.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
What will happen? The same thing that happened to my AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy profiles. They ascended to a higher plane of consciousness.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Offers free web-based backup for a wide range of social sites: http://www.backupify.com/tour/details/facebook
Do they really strip the meta-information? I was under the impression that if you didn't strip it yourself before uploading, everyone could see where you were when you took the photos.
If you're a Windows user - get Picasa.
If you're a Mac user - iPhoto works great.
If you're a Linux/BSD user - teach her about tar.
#DeleteChrome
Tell her the US Government has a copy of everything and they never go away. With proper identification, she can possibly request the pics under FOIA. ;-)
Where in the hell did the pictures come from to begin with? Why not start with the obvious location (source) and back THAT up.
I'm not sure what happened to Ray, I haven't seen or heard from him for a while either. He's still updating his blog, so hopefully he's just busy doing the good work that has earned him so much respect.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I use the pro version of SocialSafe, which costs $7. On this page is a table comparing the free and pro versions. I do keep the originals of my photo's on my pc, but I use this tool to preserve what I and others posted on my wall.
It's nice to hear an expert's opinion, but honestly I think I could have called a higher hit rate, and not only am I not a lawyer but I don't even live in the US. NYCL is the legal equivalent of the Linux zealot who is genuinely shocked each time a new release of Linux From Scratch fails to topple Windows from the OS throne.
Many of use got used to the idea of offsite backups for our local hard drives.
When applications are in "the cloud", you need the opposite: a way to "backdown" in case the provider goes offline or changes the ToS in ways you don't like.
Some kind of sophisticated browser cache might be the best way to do this. I know I've seen some things like that. You'd probably still have to have the cache do slightly different things for different sites; but I think a browser-cache approach is probably a good starting point.
Obviously, there are some types of links that generate virtually infiinite content, so you have to watch out for that; OTOH, the stuff we really care about (pictures, comments about pictures, text) tends to be, in essence, static content. It shouldn't be that difficult to scrape it and archive it locally (famous last words).
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I use the service provided by Great Lakes SAN (http://glsan.com). It's a cool service that provides an on-site NAS and sends backups to the cloud to keep for DR purposes.
If Facebook is your primary photo storage mechanism, you have other problems to worry about. Facebook should be a place you put low(er) resolution copies of your photos, or barring that, a place you put your photos after they are put in your long term storage facility. Be that your desktop, a backup system, a remote server, etc... Facebook is, by any definition, NOT the place you want to keep a sole copy of your precious photos.
Once a picture is uploaded to the internet its likely that it will always be there, not matter what.
Yes I can make a hard copy of pictures and text I put on slashdot, and other websites, but the copies get lost, the websites purge the old stuff or disappear completely. My computers loose the stuff on them about once per year. Redundant times 4 or 5 is costly and/or time consuming. Even deciding what we want to keep long term is time consuming. there does not appear to be any good solution. Neil
There should be a word now for this rite of passage - the first time you realize how fragile the web service you depend on is, or even that you depend on it. It is a loss of innocence that you may not be able to prevent. For me it was when I upgraded machines and discovered that the five or six songs I had "bought" from RealPlayer's store (to listen to on my Palm Pilot) were only "mine" if I was willing to go through customer support hell each time I replaced my system or hard drive. .
Second. Don't be silly. IF you want to save status updates....
You said: "Do they really strip the meta-information? I was under the impression that if you didn't strip it yourself before uploading, everyone could see where you were when you took the photos."
Well, even if they said they did, would you believe them?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
iEYEABECAAYFAk1wXzwACgkQLnc9OVO/yZ6HwwCeNMxI+FsxudCxpo0J3tYKyKsl
IPQAn2l/SOLLX6FLisvu4od4oxO+z+L/
=AG3j
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
This is the GPG signature of the text with all spaces, tabs, newlines and other non-printable characters removed.
To check validity of this signature, put the plain text into PlainTextFile, and the signature (including beginning and end lines) into SignatureFile, and use this command:
tr -cd [:graph:] PlainTextFile | gpg --verify SignatureFile -
Hmm... okay, this GPG signature seems really clumsy...
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Our source pictures WERE jpegs weighing 2.5MB for 7MP camera. Uploading to "back'em up" results in resizing and resolution loss: facebook (their retrievable backups at least) is storing them as supposedly no more than 200k*. Most pics retrieved in the 28MB zip were 80k or so... barely acceptable for blowing up and editing, and if it's the first time some of you think about this, then think especially about those ~600 million FBers who don't expect their precious memories to have degraded quality.
There is another issue which FB warns about: if you click around in the resulting site-backup-like file structure you'll find that all the data you were hiding from certain groups is there in the clear, including your full birthdate, association information and so on. This is NOT something you would want someone to steal via social engineering, all nicely pre-packaged to be sold to higher-level scammers.
* The recently changed photo upload dialog compresses photos prior to departure to finish quicker, so FB can no longer "steal" a full size version and shortchange you... FB used to upload your megapixel shots fully in the past, but isn't giving us access to them.
What happens when the Internet dies and then no one has access to their precious photos or data. Too many people have their heads in the clouds. I want hard copies of all my pictures and info lathed in titanium for prosperity...
Data rots.
Not to mention the annoying habit some companies have of putting files online but then moving them to their FTP server (which is inaccessible for approx. 20 hours out of every day since it seems to be on a 1.5 Mbps line somewhere in Taiwan).
I've had that issue with a whole bunch of hardware manufacturers, the moment some piece of hardware is no longer their latest and greatest all the drivers and docs end up dumped on some FTP that it takes me days to fetch the files from. Much better to just archive stuff locally.
Oh well, even that was worse in the '90s, one major motherboard manufacturer actually seemed to have a completely non-functional FTP server back then (down most of the time, when it wasn't down it took ages to respond only to finally tell you that anonymous access wasn't allowed).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Depending on the amount of content you want to back-up you could do like me. Rent a dedicated server.
Overkill you think? I'm a photographer and photoshop enthusiast and so is my daughter. Everyone in our family plays at least one musical instrument we have a family band so we back-up those recordings as well. There are currently about 21.000 images on that server last time I checked a few gig of musical related audio and video content.
But the main reason for opting for a dedicated server is privacy I don't trust Facebook or any similar service with my data.
Photograbber downloads all pictures of a contact *hint hint* http://code.google.com/p/photograbber/
www.weberseite.at
When Facebook goes dark it's likely your pictures are eaten by a grue.
IMHO, using iPhoto on a Mac with a timemachine backup. And yes one set in the cloud as FB.
True you can use a other system and other software than iphoto. But I find that to be the simplest way to make sure your memories are safe.
Keep pictures in their native high resolution on hard drives/DVD/Blurays.
With all the tiny shred of modesty left inside me, I don't think this deserves to be a Slashdot question, most hi-techies I know either don't have a facebook account or if they do they are a bit ashamed of having one.
I think someone has already figure this out http://mygosscon.oscc.org.my/2010/component/docman/doc_download/72-open-data-private-access
I think it's a more general problem for the Digital Age.
It's not just FaceBook, but a lot of other sites as well. Sourceforge, Flickr, YouTube might be closer to a lot of Slashdotters.
But even if you download and keep a local copy that you back-up. In the longer run the problem becomes reading the old file formats.
A lot of the older stuff I have is in CorelDraw, WordPerfect or older versions on MS Office format. Or even more obscure things.
This question is much bigger than FaceBook. it's about how we keep the things that we don't have on paper any more and keep being able to access them.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
yeah, that's the way to roll. if you're inconsistent where you place photos they'll end up in multiple collections.
also using multiple services proofs your online connections, so if i'm connected to someone on irc and facebook and occasional email and live meeting, it's quite probable that we can stay connected, even in case of war.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Look, casual people aren't capable of handling their own server and why should they be.
And guess what ? You're note required to be a network guru to have your own blog nowadays. You can go anywhere between your own sever in your basement, through a wordpress installation on a web host that you pay, all the way up to blog provider where you only have to sign-in. The problem isn't the technical know how, but the links.
Also, it would mean that it all gets non-organized and you have to follow several different sites, nor can you plan events or use any other social features that Facebook offers. [...] Facebook handles it in a non-intrusive way.
But in a very proprietary and non-interface-able way. E-mail works well (well, almost. Due to spam, it's hard to host a mail server in your basement on a DSL IP), because there's a standard. Chat starts to work this way thanks to XMPP. Blogs feature RSS and ping backs. Etc.
Yes people need all this organised well. Yes that's why it can't be done with blogs/albums/etc. alone because the social link and relevance isn't supported on those platforms. ...but....
People are fundamentally locked to FaceBook, because there's no otherway this could be done currently. No way for something outside FB to interact with it. Users from Hi5, StudiVZ, Bebo, etc. can't interoperate with Facebook.
For people to be in charge of their own data, they need to have solution that can interoperate, no matter where deployed.
Diaspora is an attempt to fix this.
Geeks could run theire local copy in their basement server.
Casual users could use large scale providers and pay no attention to the minute administrative detail.
And no single entity would hold the control of all this.
But that takes time until it matures into a complete solution. Until it can smoothly and progressively replace the statu quo.
On the other hand, thanks to the regular blunders of FaceBook, we're sure that FaceBook will keep providing their own reasons to quit them. If a distributed solution matures enough and is in good shape to sit into its position, it might slowly start replacing facebook during their next blunder.
Just use it correctly and see how great Facebook is.
And you should realise that, the day Zuckerberg blows a mental fuse, all could go away on a whim. FB is centralised and that's where the problems comes from.
Anti-FB don't criticise FB's usefulness. They criticise how it's both centralised and completely closed.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
there's this new technology called "photographic printing" what it does is it takes your pictures, and puts them on paper!
they can last over 100 years that way!
it's awesome!
i use these guys:
www.tricolorlab.com
Why would you ever consider that a repository for your photos? It's a place to share them, but that sure as hell is not where you want to store them for keep sake. When you upload photos to FB they are down rez'd. The image quality of them is lost. That reason alone is why you should NEVER consider it a long term store for your records. Read the fine print, it's explained.
Most devices made these days have something called a "hard disk drive," which can store data. Amazingly, the "data" is actually inside your own computer when stored on these "hard disk drives," and will survive even if the Internet turns off. You can even use "removable storage" options to keep your photos on a DVD, but this is only for advanced users since DVDs are really for movies.
I think is is odd that this poster things Facebook will be going away some time soon. Forever is a long time and I am sure it will change over time, but Facebook is a great service that a lot of people love, including myself. Facebook seems to be getting more and more popular. I really doubt the core Facebook service will be discontinued. If anything there will be competing services, but FB definitely has an advantage because so many people use it and a lot of people only have time for one FB type site. Sometimes FB is overly hyped. I do think it is a little overkill the way every commercial website also has a FB page. However, I enjoy FB every day. I love the way I can easily keep up with my relatives and my friends from different parts of my life. My Facebook news feed is a much more satisfying read than the national news sites. Also I think most of the criticism of Zuckerburg is sour grapes. He is a 26 year old who invented and successfully brought to market a very successful product that a lot of people really use and enjoy. Not too many people can claim that. FB also generated many jobs and changed the way people communicate and connect. Pretty impressive stuff for kid under 30, and so what if it wasnt' 100% his invention or business savy that made FB successful. Business is a team effort. No one succeeds 100% solo. If FB is imperfect, oh well. Don't use it or work with it. FB is not the end all be all, but it is an great service that many people like and expect will continue to use. As for the photo issue, most people who upload photos to FB will have the photos on their local computer. 15 year olds are usually clueless about a lot of things, so it hardly shocking that this girl would not know that. I think is more shocking that her parents are so certain that FB will not last. Exactly what facts support that?
Sites which recompress your pictures *usually* strip out EXIF data, I assume simply because it takes up space and they're trying to pack the image into as small a filesize as possible.
To verify, you could use one of a couple of EXIF viewers that can be installed as Firefox plugins (Exif Viewer, FxIF). Note that if a site offers multiple versions of the same image, you should check all of them (i.e. I'd check both the standard-resolution image that Facebook displays, and the high quality version that's available to download).
Giving the one and only copy to another party is risks losing it. Basic life lesson.
Hasn't she read the Terms of Use? By posting the pictures on Facebook they're no longer hers.
You should look at the Diaspora project. It's a bit immature now, but shows promise. Also, you could make sure to use something like Carbonite and local backups cycled periodically through a safety-deposit box.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Keeping local copies of everything on disks. CD-RW's are throw away cheap now so there is really no legitimate reason to lose any data that you want to keep.
"What this country needs now is a drink." -FDR