Linked: “Raiders of the Lost Web”

via The Atlantic:

It was worth the effort. Vaughan’s story about the 1961 crash, a 34-part series that spanned more than a month in early 2007, was a sensation. “I don’t want to overstate it,” Vaughan said. “But I feel like it was transformative for the people who went through that tragedy. I’ve had people tell me, for instance, that the series cut loose all this emotion that they had bottled up inside, most of them for their entire lives.” Readers wrote in to say they’d sit at their computers at midnight, refreshing their browsers until the next installment appeared. “It had tremendous impact,” Temple said, recalling a community meeting that drew 800 people in response to the series. “It was a big deal.”

“We did a couple of those public forums,” Vaughan said. “In one of them, somebody asked John Temple how long the series was going to be on the Internet, and John said, ‘Forever.’”

In 2008, Vaughan was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for the series. The next year, the Rocky folded. And in the months that followed, the website slowly broke apart. One day, without warning, “The Crossing” evaporated from the Internet.

This article was the best thing I’ve read all week. A further validation of my personal pursuits in protecting my own data in an age where a 5 second Vine video is posted, liked and in a matter of minutes, down so far on a user’s timeline that it’s basically forgotten and that user is on to the next video. When Vine as a service goes away, the content creator gets a new iPhone and it wasn’t backed up anywhere owned by the creator, it ceases to exist. That’s the age we live in.

New stories may stick around longer, text is pretty safe with Archive.org in existence but rich-media is dead once the server hosting it goes down. I can’t stress this enough to my readers. If you have data you spent time creating, curating and appreciating, please back it up to a physical location you own in two different places so you will have that thing 5-50 years from now. You’ll need to slowly move digital media around as newer methods for connecting storage to a computer are invented but it’s imperative you keep your own backups.

Save the things you love. Don’t rely on a server farm or cloud to be there forever.

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