I have reached my archival maximum (when your crazy ideas actually work out)

[Cele]

When I was a kid, I had a website on Freewebs. (Well, many sites, but here I'm talking about one of them.) I worked on it a lot and it had a bunch of stuff, but as you might know Webs is now long gone. I have found many of my websites from the Internet Archive, but this is one where only the front page at a certain point had been archived. I was pretty disappointed, so I emailed Webs if it was possible to access my site somehow, but they told me the site had been purged even before the closure of Webs.

Ok so that's it right. The website is gone and wasn't archived. It's gone.

 

So I had this absolutely braindead idea of hey. My parents have this ancient laptop (no battery or anything) with Windows 98 on it and an ancient Internet Explorer. And I remember very well that I have visited my site on that laptop. And I remember that when it wasn't connected to the internet, the browser would let me look at a cached version of the website. So. It's big brain time.

I found the internet cache files on this ancient laptop and what do we have here? Bingooooo. Image and HTML files referring to my old website. One problem though! I couldn't view them on the laptop because of... Windows 98 bs, it basically didn't let me change the program with which it launched the files. So I couldn't view them. Man, if only I had a way to move the files to a different computer... But this ancient laptop has no ports for stuff like that, and it couldn't write on a CD. I couldn't do anything about it, but I asked my dad and I think he copied the whole hard drive to his current laptop.

So I took a look at what exactly was in there. Indeed, pages from my website! Fully accessible! (Unfortunately, not all of the pages, but I'll take what I can get). And old images, long since gone!

Not only my images, but images from other old websites, as well as old graphics like forum avatars. I'm pretty excited to dig in deeper into all the stuff that's in those cache files.

[wodaro]

That's so cool!!!!! Congrats on getting that back!!

I used to be terrible at archiving my stuff, sooooo many digital projects and art forgotten because my laptops kicked the bucket and I had no backup or any idea of how to get it off the hard drive... so I just sadly sent them off to get recycled and forgotten. That's something I'm trying to improve for the things I'm making now, and the few old things I still have thanks to google drive.

If you do share the stuff you found on the cache files I bet it would be really interesting to see!!

[Memory]

That's so cool, almost like a little time capsule!

Digital data is at the same so fleeting (when you want to look back into the past) and incredibly long lasting (when you want the internet to forget something).

[Cele]

If you do share the stuff you found on the cache files I bet it would be really interesting to see!!

I'd love to share the graphics but I have gathered 152 relevant files from there and I'm not quite sure yet how to share them, where to upload etc. Ideas?