Zoto is down for now.  Back toward the middle of last year we started losing drives out of both the NAS and the cluster boxes.  These drives were manufactured by Western Digital. Evidently they don't fare so well, and have a high failure rate.  Lesson learned: don't buy WD drives.

Anyway, the site went down about 10 times over about half as many months, with Clint (without who I could not have done all this) and I trying to keep things up the best we could.  In September I ended up moving Zoto to my house in California (where they have lots of bandwidth) and continued nursing it along.  Toward the first of the year the NAS crashed again, this time with a fatal two drive failure.  Oh noes.

You can read about my adventures in getting all the photos back off a multi-drive failure of a RAID5 array with (12) drives in it, and trying to get Zoto migrated to Amazon on this blog.  The tl;dr; of the whole mess is that midway through the process I made the decision that I didn't want to continue to risk the possibility of losing more people's photos by continuing the service in such a flaky manner.  And so, regardless of a few crackpot's protests, I decided to leave the site down permanently and focus on getting peeps photos back.

I've been successful at getting photos back to the people that need them.  By doing that, hopefully I salvaged what small bit of credibility I had in promising Zoto would "keep your photos safe".  However, I've probably lost all credibility in my ability to hack up a horribly complicated system to run on Amazon.  Can't win them all!

If you are in need of recovering your photos from the old Zoto install, please see this form:  http://kordless.wufoo.com/forms/zoto-accounts/.  I run the updates every few days.  Depending on demand, I may automate the process with a self serve form.

If you are interested in what I'm planning on doing with the site and company, stay tuned.  It should be relevant to your interests, and be well within my ability to implement.