Instructive tale of how someone lost 4,000 photos as a result of an accidental deletion by Flickr.

When Mirco Wilhelm tried to log into his Flickr account yesterday, he was surprised to find that his 5-year-old Pro account with roughly 4,000 photographs had completely vanished. It then dawned on him that only a week earlier he had reported another account for posting stolen photographs.

He immediately wrote to Flickr and received an apologetic reply. But…

Unfortunately, I have mixed up the accounts and accidentally deleted yours. I am terribly sorry for this grave error and hope that this mistake can be reconciled. Here is what I can do from here:

I can restore your account, although we will not be able to retrieve your photos. I know that there is a lot of history on your account–again, please accept my apology for my negligence. Once I restore your account, I will add four years of free Pro to make up for my error.

Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do.
Again, I am deeply sorry for this mistake.

So… back to my question: do you keep your pics in the Cloud?

UPDATE:Happy endings Department. Flickr eventually succeeded in restoring his photographs. And they gave him a 25-year free Pro account to make up for the fright. Thanks to all the readers who told me about it.