Over the 9 years I have been using Yahoo I have accumulated hundreds of contacts, organized into 35 different lists. A month or two ago almost all of those contacts were lost, although the lists still appear. This all happened around the time Yahoo was making changes to their systems, so I suspect that the data was lost in that process. I have made several attempts to contact Yahoo but the only response I get is that contacts can only be recovered within 10 days of them going missing and that I should have backed them up myself.
First, is it disconcerting that a major service such as Yahoo could loose this data without access to any backup. I wouldn’t mind loosing some updates, even if they had to go back months to recover at least some of them. Secondly, I have found it impossible to find a contact address to escalate my complaint beyond the largely automated method available at their site. It appears that Yahoo is not really interested in hearing about times when their existing procedures fail.
While I agree that backing up my own data would, in retrospect, have been a good idea, I foolishly believed that storing the data with a billion dollar company would have been safer than storing it on my 6 year old laptop. For what it is worth, I have been paying for Yahoo! Plus services for at least three years. You would think that a company the size of Yahoo would have better procedures for protecting their customer’s data. Bottom line: do not depend on Yahoo to maintain your data. More importantly, do not expect them to care at all about how their screw ups effect their customers.
