Updated 4/8/20: We've updated this story with a new statement from Canon now that the image.canon service is back online.
Just a few months after it launched, Canon's image.canon cloud storage platform recently had to temporarily shut down after an issue caused the loss of some users' photo and video files. Well, now it's back online, with Canon confident that it's resolved the issues.
The service went down on 30 July, with a new statement on the image.canon site saying that "after the investigation, we identified that some of the photo and video image files saved in the 10GB long-term storage prior to June 16, 2020 9am (JST) were lost".
It "temporarily suspended" the service over the weekend, but "after having resolved the issue that resulted in the loss of the photo and video image files, we resumed the image.canon service as of August 4, 2020".
That's not quite the end of the story, though. There are still some problems with image thumbnails, with Canon saying that "if a user tries to download or transfer a still image thumbnail file, an error message may be received. We are currently exploring technical counter measures."
If you're not familiar with the service, the image.canon platform is mainly designed to act as a temporary bridge between your Canon camera and permanent backup solutions like Google Drive, but also offers 10GB or permanent storage for your most important snaps and videos.
It's that 10GB storage that's been affected by this recent issue. Canon added that "there has been no leak of image data" and that "we have confirmed that the still image thumbnails of the affected files have not been affected", although that's unlikely to be much consolation to the affected users.
While there's never a good time for a cloud platform to get an issues like this, it's perhaps fortunate that it's happened to image.canon so soon after it's launched, before too many users were affected.
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Get off this cloud
The idea behind image.canon is certainly a solid one, in theory – the service automatically connects your Canon camera to the cloud (as long as it's a supported model), and transfers all your photos and movies (including raw files and 4K videos) to a temporary library for 30 days.
From here, you can either transfer them to other services, including Google Drive, Google Photos and Adobe Creative Cloud, or chuck the most important ones into that 10GB permanent storage. But Canon will need to find a quick fix to the latter if people are going to trust it with their most important memories.
The fact that image.canon is more of a replacement for the discontinued 'Canon Image Gateway', which helped you upload media to the cloud, rather than its Irista cloud storage service, means this issue isn't quite as serious as an equivalent one would be for the likes of Google Photos.
But it is a blow for service that's only just launched and for Canon too, which has recently been fending off overheating claims about the new Canon EOS R5 and clarifying that it won't need to be recalled.
We'll continue to update this story with more official information as soon as we get it.
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