Those images you lost on image.canon? Yeah, you ain’t getting them back Canon says
Aug 11, 2020
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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Canon has posted an update to the recent issues surrounding its image.canon service. According to TechRadar, the official word from Canon now is that they did not find any unauthorised access to the system as a result of the issue that caused data loss. They say that it’s completely unrelated to the ransomware attack, which also happened last week.
The company has now confirmed that that the whole data loss issue was down to a simple coding error. Unfortunately, they’ve also confirmed that this is an irreversible error and those images and videos that were lost are lost permanently and can not be recovered.
Coding errors pop up from time to time for all websites. It happens. But rarely do systems from such high profile companies have errors that result in permanent data loss of its users’ personal files like this, apparently without any form of backup. According to the statement from Canon, though, that’s exactly what happened.
Canon says that its cloud service has two basic functions. One is short term temporary storage. Here you can upload images directly from their camera for 30 days. During this time they can shift ’em over to long term storage (like Google Drive) or just let them time out and get deleted. But image.canon also offers up to 10GB long-term storage of their own as well.
It seems, that these two services got confused when they switched over to new software on July 30th. The “30 days and you’re deleted” routine was running on both the short and long term storage services. So, all those images and videos that have disappeared were files from the long term storage that users specifically wanted to keep.
Canon has not said how many of its users have been affected by this issue, but if you’re one of them, I hope you had some local backups, too.
[via TechRadar]
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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3 responses to “Those images you lost on image.canon? Yeah, you ain’t getting them back Canon says”
Canon is now announcing an all new line of external SSDs for their camera users saying “They’re like the cloud but lack the possibility of us deleting your files”
Now I know not all SSDs are perfect either but if you have your images on a cloud service it is still best to have that same data stored somewhere locally and even keep two copies if you are able to.
“Canon says that its cloud service has two basic functions. One is short term temporary storage. Here you can upload images directly from their camera for 30 days. During this time they can shift ’em over to long term storage (like Google Drive) or just let them time out and get deleted. But image.canon also offers up to 10GB long-term storage of their own as well.”
Why Canon? There are services out there like AWS S3 to avoid just that.
I hope the description above is wrong because a home made solution is a bad idea.
I don’t trust any cloud or off site storage. I burn valuable photos and files on DVD and make an extra backup copy.