Not only is what you said correct, it's from the second sentence of the article: Mirco Wilhelm has the original files saved elsewhere, but the photos from his extensive Flickr collection had been linked to from all over the web, including the official Flickr blog.

I am forced to conclude that few read the article, since most of the comments have focused on the - erroneous - idea that he depended on Flickr to store his data and had no backups.