Well that, and the focus of the story is his relationship with Asami, so if he saved his friends without Asami, we'd miss out on some hot sex. :)
I took the tech lag into account by not wondering why they didn't upload photos/data to their "cloud".
Well the disk he mailed to Asami is pretty old tech too, and fell into disuse in the mid to late 2000s - iCloud is from around 4 years ago.
He seems to use old film cameras, but have CDs too. :)
Many photojournalists still use old film cameras - I still use mine (I took photography - not photojournalism) In fact I have cameras that are at least 50 years old in my collection - because the teachers at my University taught us a love for film cameras (and you can often get better results with film than digital - although that has changed in the past few years) I don't recall seeing any CDs, but I was not really on the lookout for them - I did have to look up what an MO Disk was though as I had not seen one before (3.5 inch disks yes but we did not call them MOs where I live)
So here is a question that I had again when watching the Animix: Why didn't Aki text his friends that he didn't tell them to go to the boat, and that it was a trap? He could have said he made someone mad with a picture, and they were trying to set his friends up, and the guys could have gotten out before Fei went to them.