Digital Railroad extends photo download time
I blogged on Wednesday about the photo archiving site Digital Railroad's abrupt shutdown, leaving thousands of professional photographer customers confused and worried. On Thursday, I got a statement saying that the site will extend the window time until Friday, October 31, 11:59 p.m. PST, for customers to migrate their photo archives.
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Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)
The statement comes from both PhotoShelter and Diablo Management Group, the firm in charge of the shut down the defunct Digital Railroad, and reads:
As part of the process of terminating the business operations of Digital Railroad, Diablo Management Group has informed PhotoShelter of its intent to shut down the DRR site as early as 11:59 p.m PST on Friday October 31. After this point, it is very likely that all the images located on the Digital Railroad servers could be permanently inaccessible. Given the strong possibility of this event, PhotoShelter, on its own initiative, is strongly suggesting that customers migrate their files from Digital Railroad immediately. Digital Railroad, at the present time, has no plans or resources to accomplish this task.
Earlier this week, on Tuesday, upon announcing the termination of operations, DRR stated it would provide only 24 hours of server access, which actually lasted only about 10 hours. This tiny window of time was exceedingly insufficient both in terms of making the news known to concerned parties, as well as time to download their photos off DRR's server.
Although the extension through October 31 is still short, it will provide more time to help photographers find backup options and transition their online presence. Both DRR and PhotoShelter stress that the situation is highly fluid and the deadline could be altered with little or no notice.
Since Tuesday, PhotoShelter has offered DRR customers a special three-month free offer and FTP solution to help migrate their images.
If you are a customer of DRR or know somebody who is, it is time to take action before it is late.
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Dong Ngo is a CNET editor who covers networking and network storage, and writes about anything else he finds interesting. You can also listen to his podcast at insidecnetlabs.cnet.com. E-mail Dong. 
