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Comment by djloche | Hacker News Reader

Seeing as they're shutting down the company/service in a week, they're probably out of cash. While it sucks for your customers, that's what happens when you run out of money. It sucks for everyone. I'm guessing they were floating the company on personal funds in hopes the acquisition would go through, but it did not - so now they're doing everything they can to stop this turning into a personal financial bloodbath from the bandwidth costs spiral due to everyone rushing to get their photos before the shutdown.

Just an ugly situation for everyone.

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Here's a solution: https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/523215681412546562

Dustin Curtis: "Can anyone put me in touch with the founder of Twitpic?(I'll pay to backup all of the photos, and even host them. Ridiculous situation.)"

This Noah guy (the founder) is really hard to get in contact with. If anyone can make an intro--hi@dustincurtis.com

Why are people worrying about backups? Certainly people had no expectation of recoverability of photos hosted on a free service? Or was TwitPic promising that?

They're straight-up refusing to talk to Jason about giving Archive Team a data dump. There's an ugly situation, but only one side is precipitating it.

Maybe they are holding out that someone will purchase still? They lose all their value the second the archive team gets all their data right?

Edit: On second thought, I agree that it's probably related to the bandwidth cost.

Sneakernet could be a cost effective option especially for large volumes of data, and its often overlooked.

I wonder if the Archive Team has considered sending twitpic a hard drive and asking them to just rsync the data over?

Edit: This assumes that they keep backups of said data outside of EC2. Walking a hard drive over to your local Amazon DC.. won't quite work.

Amazon will provide drives for their export feature. People have already offered to foot the bill to have it done.

There are hundreds of TBs of data.

It's not about cost. AT members and Dustin Curtis have offered to pay for it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472998 https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/523215681412546562

Yeah, I think they just don't want or can't pay for the bandwidth. Or, perhaps they are trying to make Twitter feel bad and buy them. Either way it's a bad situation, but isn't necessarily evil on their part to not want to put anything more into a dying venture.

For those downvoting this - why don't you try paying for 800M images to be leached from the server of a failed company of yours with no hope of recouping a single dollar.

Any such cost would be several orders of magnitude smaller than the millions of dollars of advertising revenue those images have been pulling in for twitpic over the years.

Let's not pretend that Noah is down to his last packet of ramen noodles, here. Twitpic is a long way from being a "failed company" by any reasonable definition of the term.

You're getting downvoted because you somehow missed that multiple people have offered to carry the cost of export from S3.

Random people from the Internet offering to pay a bill likely to be in the low five figures. That sounds like it would work out well. "I sent him a copy of the bill and he's not responding. I don't understand.....he said he would pay. He even gave me his Twitter handle!"

Those "random people from the Internet" you are dismissing include a number of well-respected site owners, operators, and entrepreneurs.

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