The lesson learned should be, invest in your own devices to back up & store your data on. Data not on a device you control is data in danger of exactly what happened, being deleted at the whim someone else. Portable devices are inexpensive, and no one has control over them but you.
Thanks, but I do back up as a rule, having a good amount of storage via SSDs, and did not say that I lost anything of value, but that they did not even offer to provide such, nor even a actual explanation for their sudden deletion (and no, there was/is no policy that required all free accts to upgrade to a paid accounts in order to maintain their content - except for Restricted or Moderate content, which none of mine were cited as).
The issue is not that of losing my own data, but of making it available for all. I should have made it clearer that the purpose of my post was that of providing another example of wanton liberal censorship, thus not to be trusted.
Exactly. I have a 500 gig passport drive I keep all my important stuff on. No cloud storage here. Photobucket keeps sending me emails about upgrading or lose it. Don’t care. I’d rather be in control.