Posted 08/06/09 at 12:54:14 PM by Paul Lilly

Maximum PC readers have long had the importance of maintaining backups beat into their heads, but apparently photo-hosting service isn't a subscriber to the magazine. How else do you explain losing thousands of user photos with no way to restore them?

Or at least that's the case if you believe a purportedly scorned user who claims to have had his Flickr account hacked and then terminated. According to Morgan Tepsic, a photographer and soon-to-be art student in Taipei, Taiwan, he woke up to discover three concerning emails in his inbox:

1. [redacted]@hotmail.com has been added to your account!
2. Your password has been changed!
3. Your account has been terminated!

After contacting the Yahoo-owned service about the security breach, Tepsic said he was told "it isn't possible to restore the content of the account." Flickr did offer to restore his screen name and URL, "but unfortunately the images, comments, and other content isn't recoverable."

There's a lot more to Tepsic's customer support nightmare, which you can read here, assuming you're not offended by big, bolded F-bombs.

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