Sunday, June 15th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Mediamax (Now The Linkup) Screws Free Users
When my sister was returning to her books and husband (in that order 
) in the United States after coming down home to pass a kid down the factory line (don’t tell her I said that!), she left a PC here with lots of her personal data on it.
After promising and procrastinating for well over a year, I decided, today, to upload her stuff to an online storage account for her — so she could download them to her computer (I know she’s not the “hang all your panties online” sort of person.)
So I went over to Mediamax (which I must confess, I’ve not used for quite some time), pulled out my account details from Gmail … and see what I found (all emphasis mine):
So I clicked over to The Linkup, and of course, I couldn’t log in. The password retrieval tool even told me my email address is not in their system.
Sure, my account was a free account. And there maybe a clause buried somewhere in their TOS that says that all free users who don’t log into their account after x number of days would be kicked out (which like you, I never bothered to read).
Who knows? That’s why I really want to give them the benefit of my doubt — and just make believe that the issue with my account may be a random one… some bug or something that occurred during the transition.
But with statements like what’s above, I’m left with no choice but to conclude that they kicked out all free users during the transition from Mediamax to The Screwup Linkup.
Have I contacted them? Nope. And I’m not going to. I really didn’t have anything I couldn’t afford to lose in there. So no back-and-forth communication is worth my while. And oh, I do multiple backups with different online services.
I’m still waiting for GDrive to arrive, if it ever will. For now I’ve created a new Mozy account that I’m using to backup the girl’s data so she can grab them.
I knew you'd ask! George Appiah is a traveling technology consultant helping individuals, small businesses and non-profits leverage technology to hack poverty out of the world. Not enough for you? 
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George, you might be interested in a Sorious Samura live streaming tonight. There’ll be a discussion afterwards, also streamed and the whole event is embeddable:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/frontline-club
The event starts at 7.30pm UK time tonight 16 June. If you miss it, you can watch the recorded version which will appear after the event. More info on the film director and the event here:
http://www.frontlineclub.com/club_events.php?event=2329
How effective are foreign based charities in Africa? Is there an alternative to the top-down approach which has dominated the aid industry for decades? Earlier this year Sorious Samura and Storyhouse Films spent a month searching for answers by looking at the operations of an organisation called AfriKids in Ghana.
The result is a documentary film that impacts not only on the local area, but on Africa as a whole.
Just thought it might be of interest, would have emailed, but couldn’t find your email address
[...] the online storage company that just recently relaunched as The LinkUp (and which I recently bashed for screwing free users during the transition) is finally throwing in towel and closing up for [...]
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