[Sca-cooks] GeoCities is closing in October

[Woodrow Hill]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 02:53, Sharon Palmer <ranvaig at columbus.rr.com> wrote:

> They are just gone unless people chose to back their sites up and move them.
>  Yahoo owns Geocities and decided not to have free webhosting any more.
>  Although I suspect that if you chose Yahoo's paid service, they might have
> the site backed up.  Maybe.

Yes; GeoCities Plus customers have their site maintained, but cannot
update it until they upgrade:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/geocities/close/close-09.html

> Some (but not all) may be backed up on the Internet Archive, although their
> disclaimer says that material is typically available 6 months after
> collection.
> http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

There were, in fact, 3 separate projects, one run by the IA group, to
archive the Geocities data (this is in addition to the temporary
caching Google does by default):

http://www.archive.org/web/geocities.php
http://reocities.com/
http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Geocities_Project

The latter site explains a lot of this, but to sum up:

* The vast majority of Geocities is toast. Indeed, I'd wager it's the
fact there were a tiny number of Geocities Plus customers, along with
the relative pittance adverts on standard Geocities made (in relation
to the insane amount of data they were storing) that led to this.
* If people on this list have moved their sites, please let us know
where! There's no forwarding for any of this, so unless you were
contacted or otherwise know the new link, the only way to find out is
to use a search engine to find words and phrases the site used, in
hopes the new site's been indexed.
* The above teams indexed everything they could get their hands on.
That's not everything. Because of the nature of the 'Net, a site with
few, or even no, links from other sites could have been missed.
Standalone pages with few links could have suffered a similar issues.
And, of course, they could have just run out of time and not gotten to
the site in question.

And, as a bit of a OT rant: As someone who himself is slowly
reconstructing from a recent, and frustrating, data loss -- I
recommend everyone ensure their backups are, well, backed up. None of
the "free" services -- Gmail, Facebook, MySpace, etc. -- can or do
promise they'll keep your data through thick and thin. Even services
you pay for can croak, as people on T-Mobile using the Sidekick phones
recently found out.

I use 'em. I'll keep using them, because in my highly mobile and
data-intense lifestyle, it's worth the risks. But if you have things
you want to keep, I suggest you make sure you're backing up, and that
the email addresses for services you use are up-to-date and working
properly, at a minimum.

> Ranvaig

----asim

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