Toss this one in the interesting things to note pile. Turns out that when you delete a photo from Facebook it could be accessible (if you have the direct URL) for up to 16 months.
Why you ask? Because Facebook’s CDN (content delivery network) apparently stores the images in their cache. It begs the question, how long should they be keeping your photos after you delete them? Hopefully not long going forward if Facebook employee Simon Axten is true to his word. He made a claim in a statement to Ars Technica that they are working on a fix that will delete a photo (and video) from the Facebook CDN shortly after it is deleted from Facebook.
Shortly being the keyword here as 16 months ago they told Ars Technica writer Jacqui Cheng that they only store images for “A LIMITED AMOUNT OF TIME” after removal. If Facebook thinks that 16 months is “limited” I wonder how long they think “Shortly” is?
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1 Comment at "How Long Does it Take to Delete a Facebook Photo"
It’s a sensitive topic to be sure. The point of a CDN is to quicken things up by letting everyone around the world grab the content from a server that is close by, rather than going halfway around the world to the master server. When you ask for an item, if it’s in the CDN cache server nearest you, you get it from there. Quick and efficient. But the other side of the coin: this means having potentially thousands of copies of each item spread around the world.
Keeping them all in sync is quite a job. To keep things quick and efficient, your local cache server just serves up the content without checking with the master, for some period of time. After the timeout period, the cache server will ask the master server back home if there’s been any change (or deletion).
Choosing a reasonable timeout period is a tradeoff…too short, and you might as well just send everyone back to the main server every time. Too long, and your content can get outdated (or not get deleted, like we’re discussing now). I have to say that 16 months does seem like an awfully long timeout. My guess is that Mr. Axten is referring to an upcoming shortening of the timeout period, at least for pictures.
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