I am sure we all laughed at the end, there, when one of the members of Archive Team, slaving like the rest of us to yank data out, suggested a link to a Geocities page with a MIDI of “The Final Countdown” by Europe.  The perfect tinny music to blast out of the speakers as we watched a massive site come grinding to a halt.

As it turned out, the machines of Geocities did not die on October 26th, but instead started to come down around 12:30pm PST on October 27th; we assume nobody felt a need to stay up late at Yahoo to do the work and instead began taking machines down and redirecting at the start of the next day. Fine with us – that was 24 hours of bandwidth-absorbing madness we visited upon the servers before their shutdown.

I was already rsyncing tons of grabbed files from all the harvester machines people were running. And man, did we have data – millions of files. I’m STILL rsyncing data from some people, and will likely be doing so into the next week. All told, as much as 2 terabytes of total data was saved.

A nice surprise was the fact that we had not two but four entities that we know of currently who were trying to rescue data wholesale off Geocities.  The four are Archive Team, Archive.Org, Internet Archaeology, and Reocities (Update: And a fifth, geocities.ws). Each of these have approached things in different ways, and will likely present the resulting data differently.  But the fact that something like Reocities would slave in darkness (they didn’t know about us, we didn’t know about them) for over a week in insane download orgies says something about what was going on here.

I’ll let people know when the Geocities stuff we’ve downloaded is available again, and Archive Team Apologizes for the Downtime. We’ll have that fixed shortly.

Categorised as: computer history

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