Yes nothing is forever. We should backup that is correct but backup in this case means nothing.
Even if we backed up that pics it means nothing. Why? No freaking chance if you are member on five or more forums that you’ll find tons of your threads and post with pictures and edit that with new/old pictures.
Some forums(most forums) don’t allow edit function after some time passes(like 1 hour or 24 hours)… What is written is saved forever…
As far as I know mine is still okay. I have been a member for over 10 years and even have bonus storage. LOL if the image below (picked at random) shows guess I will know.
I must have 10K photos on PB. All my hobbies and builds have been captured in pics and hosted there for Many years. Years ago I have paid the $40/yr fee to have better access and more space. This was back when feebay allowed html in description for more and better pics. May have been 10 years since I sold anything on ebay.
I have not Paid the current Fee for the third party hosting (and will NOT) but my links have not yet been broken. I do not know why. I do keep back-ups of back-ups on the PC but I am sure there are many pics I have not kept up with back-ups from the phone. Need to get back on track with this.
Tried downloading the albums a few days ago without success. Now I am currently making folders on my PC of anything I may not have saved over the years. It all continues to go well I will get everything on the PB site saved into another drive for triplicate redundancy and a consolidated folder to get all back up to another host.
Well…… just as I said that I now get this error on the PB Site
This site can’t be reached
The connection was reset.
Try:
Checking the connection
Checking the proxy and the firewall
Running Windows Network Diagnostics
ERR_CONNECTION_RESET
Will try to mine more pics tomorrow
Probably not a good option considering tinypic is owned by Photobucket, they have very little traffic, and the traffic has dropped like a rock in the last year.
Not so deep, I’m only paying $30.
I have very few posts depending on hosted images on any forum, but I use PostImage for those rare occasions:
and it’s worked for me so far.
As for Photobucket, they’re idiots. I can see why they don’t want to provide free resources to other sites, but vandalising a big chunk of the historical Internet is not the way to go about changing that. It just creates an immensely negative image: “if they’re willing to do that much damage to all those people, what might they do to me in future, even if I do sign up?”
They should have either said: “old files will continue to work, but any file uploaded after this date will be subject to the restrictions”, or they should have gone for a maximum number of third-party accesses per file per day. They could even have inserted an automatic Photobucket credit on every free image access, although that option would have required significantly more processing power to implement.
Any of those strategies would have reduced the real abuses like massive use of free Photobucket accounts by commercial organisations selling products on e-commerce websites, without causing too many problems for ordinary people on forums.
After all, most forum images get looked at a lot for a few days, then the members move on to the next hot topic. Old images normally settle down to a much lower hit rate, with occasional bursts as new viewers come in from Google searches and the like.
I wish there was a way to download the images hosted while maintaining the albums.
This situation will be more difficult to deal with than having an email provider suddenly disappear like i12.com did or switch to a pay service like crosswinds.net did.
As was pointed out, many forums only offer a short period to edit posts so much of the damage caused can’t be repaired.
I still think for those who are trying to figure out how to get stuff off and out of wherever this fella came up with a good app for doing all that, back at post #53
All the lost stuff in PC the old DOS command, *dot jpeg, will find those misplaced and lost pics, that will show all of your pics, then just look through all 50K of them until you spot them… ha ha
Strange how if you go pay PB the apparent ransom you’ll get all your pics back or so it sounds like,
Shouldn’t that sort of be illegal and didn’t something happen just a month ago or so using something called ransomware all around the world that locked your files until you sent them a bunch of bit coins to get the key to unlock your system, has to be a law against what PB is doing, really rotten. Hey maybe PB is held hostage by that ransomware and they are just flipping the script and pretending they actually have control over the pics when in fact it’s that ransomware that locked up PB, conspiracy … 
You are probably experienced business man?
For now imgur.com seems solid…
But hosting sites will come and go. Keep your valuable data at hand!
I’ve never run a business, but I am a software engineer, and you’d be amazed how often a customer - or a manager - will say, “I want it to do this,” because they simply haven’t realised that there’s a better way.
Thinking about how to achieve the larger objective behind the request, rather than going into tunnel vision and doing exactly as you’re told, is often a useful job skill.
I wonder if anyone at Photobucket tried to head off this massive mistake, but got overruled from above?
Just found this. I dont know if its legit but I signed it anyway.
It will literally accomplish nothing even if it gets a billion signatures.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/4/15919224/photobucket-broken-images-amazon-ebay-etsy-paid-update
True but nothing will ever change if everybody does nothing.
Follow up from post #53, a bug-fixed version 1.0.4 1.0.7, now correctly replace ImageShack link, previous version miss the "http://" protocol text. Imgur link not affected.
Update 2017-07-15
MigrateFromPB version 1.0.7
https://www.dropbox.com/s/l1dqugi5bgocbal/CheckSum.txt?dl=0 (link is external)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/o4u2qamyfx6q3tz/MigrateFromPB_v1.0.7.zip?dl=0 (link is external)
Bug fix imgur migration as it will choke when 2 original file name are the same. No issue for ImageShack as I forgot to apply the fix to imgur when I fixed the ImageShack migration back in v1.0.3. 
Added new Backup Images function as I was unsuccessful when trying to backup from imgur.
Reference the checksum.txt to check the authenticity.
Update 2017-07-05:
Check Sum (use these to verify the authenticity of the file):
| MD5 | SHA1 | |
| Zip File | - | - |
| Exe File | - | - |
Documentation: -
MigrateFromPB: -
Finally finished transferring all images to ImageShack account. Have taken the opportunity to clean up the pool, removed ~20% of old images. Tomorrow will begin the slow process of updating the forum posts...
Btw, just realize that imgur re-compress the uploaded images (they claim they are using lossless compression for images less than 5MB), although they remain the same resolution, but file size is greatly reduced. They also stripped away the EXIF info and somehow convert the dpi from 72 to 96 some details are here in this article: https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000083326
One thing I truly missed from PB is the sub-folder structures... I can't create sub-albums in imgur nor ImageShack. :(
www.youtube.com/embed/CTbdTa4_J04
Photobucket probably just couldn’t afford the equipment to keep up with all hotlinking in forums (and bots that crawl forums). But they should have seen the day coming long ago and put a daily limit in place on the free accounts.
Always used imgur, free accounts keep 225 pictures visible so I have about ten different accounts there 
Well I don’t know if Photobucket deserves hate or not. But I know you can’t run a “money-hogging corporation” without money. Free hotlinking brings in zero money, and takes big money to keep alive.