Sounds like the customer service end of the business didn't talk to the technical side. Since there wasn't a push button functionality for account recovery (and it had probably never even been done before in a quick-and-dirty fashion either) to them it was gone permanently. The photos probably would never have been recovered had this issue not gotten so much attention though. This probably forced the two sides to talk (either an exec said, "Fix this" or someone on the tech side saw the publicity and said, "Wait a minute. It's still recoverable. WTF was that rep talking about?").
That is fairly routine and understandable. Let's talk about a hypothetical SaaS system built on behalf of a large institution -- say, a university -- which does not include an admin accessible undelete feature because features cost money and they struck that one from the spec.
Let's imagine that this purely hypothetical university had a user who accidentally blew away some data. From the perspective of the sysadmin, thtr data is unrecoverable. But data is never really unrecoverable. Data is like oil: if you have enough money, we can drill arbitrarily deep for it.
Let's pretend that the undelete feature would have cost our hypothetical university X. "Drill as deep as you need" might get quoted at 100X or more. And that is totally reasonable, based on the hypothetical costs and benefits of the hypothetical data recovery.
Yeah, my guess is it was actually deleted but because of the PR hoopla they went to tape or did something equivalently time-consuming to recover the data. It's something that wouldn't scale to everyone, but worth a day of someone's time in this particular high profile case.
It could be that the rep was scared to let anyone to know he messed up, so he didn't escalate the issue. Costumer should have asked to be connected with supervisor.
[+] [-] pyre|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patio11|15 years ago|reply
Let's imagine that this purely hypothetical university had a user who accidentally blew away some data. From the perspective of the sysadmin, thtr data is unrecoverable. But data is never really unrecoverable. Data is like oil: if you have enough money, we can drill arbitrarily deep for it.
Let's pretend that the undelete feature would have cost our hypothetical university X. "Drill as deep as you need" might get quoted at 100X or more. And that is totally reasonable, based on the hypothetical costs and benefits of the hypothetical data recovery.
[+] [-] wayne|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sushi|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doki_pen|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] to|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] natrius|15 years ago|reply