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Or those rare cases where people upload it on a device they no longer own.

So, these are people who take photos on device and then dispose of said device without even backing it up or copying their pictures to some form of long term storage?

Since Twitpic's purpose was to post photos inline at Twitter, what proportion of their photos have they probably lost?

Given that they can't even cope with the idea of copying their pics off this old device, what are the odds that they can cope with the idea of downloading an archive from Twitpic?

I'm all in favor of companies letting you take your data out of any service you've used, on principle, but frankly, this scenario doesn't make a lot of sense.

Sometimes 'dispose of' means 'accidentally drops in a lake'. Accidents happens, and inadequate backups are part of the human condition.

True, but the original photos are not on Twitpic, and they can always right-click and save them from the web interface.

Anyway, that's an extreme case, and web services are typically not set up to deal with extreme (in fact, totally hypothetical) cases.

I still haven't seen anybody put up a rational counter-argument. Does that mean nobody can?

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