I am a huge Flickr fan; there is nothing much bad I can say about the service. They provide unlimited photo storage and hosting for a very reasonable annual fee. The community is unlike any other that exists. I have used Flickr to host the images, on this blog, since its inception. I have participated in a photo a day group there to much enjoyment.
That said, Flickr scares me. I have been hearing a lot lately, and really for a while now about people getting entire accounts deleted (another example, another, they could go on and on just google). Granted, in most of these cases, the people involved have been living at the edge of the Flickr TOS. But the very concerning part of this is that when Flickr deletes your account it is gone, there is no recourse. Even when they admit it was a mistake or error on their part. It isn't that they won't restore you; it is that that can not restore you.
Before getting into the community and photography I used to see Flickr as prmariliy a photo backup service. I have, for a while now, been backing my images up to other services besides Flickr (Amazon S3 & Jungledisk). It is apparent, now, that while Flickr is a nice place to socialize, view and comment on photos. Flickr is a wholly inappropriate place to backup your photos. The risk of them seeing something they don't like or making a mistake and you losing all of your photos is just too great.
