I feel with you for losing things, but please do not bring the whole my rights debate here into Lemmy. If Lemmy hosts/admins start getting into legal trouble the whole network will collapse. It’s a nice place to share things without any responsibilities or rights. At least this is my opinion.

That being said, I would also strongly suggest to keep local backups of art you upload. It can always happen that data corruption occurs even on a server that might make thinga get lost, and that would be really sad in the case of art.

(Obviousely not saying this is what happened in your case.)