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Downloading an entire Geocities site with a free tool actually worked
I remember back in 1999, I had this Geocities page for my band that took me like 6 months to build with all these custom GIFs and MIDI files. Then one day I heard Yahoo was gonna shut down Geocities and I panicked. Some guy on a forum named something like "WebRipper2000" said I could grab the whole site with this free program called HTTrack. I was super skeptical because most free tools back then were just packed with spyware or would crash halfway through. But I tried it on a Sunday afternoon, pointed it at my URL, and it downloaded every single HTML file, image, and sound file to my hard drive in about 20 minutes. The whole thing was like 12 megabytes and it kept all the folder structures perfect. Has anyone else used HTTrack or a similar tool to save old sites before they disappeared?
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avery_walker301mo ago
oh man, HTTrack is such a blast from the past. I used that same tool to grab my old Angelfire page from like 2002 that had all these sparkly star dividers and a guestbook that totally stopped working years ago. but the real question is, did you actually ever go back and look at ANY of those saved files after you downloaded them? cause I got mine saved on an external drive somewhere but I'm almost scared to open them up and see how cringey my old HTML skills were. like, I remember I had this embedded MIDI file of "All Star" by Smash Mouth that autoplayed on loop and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. maybe it's just me but I feel like the fear of losing something is almost stronger than actually wanting to revisit it afterward. did you ever open any of those files up again or is it just sitting there like a digital time capsule you're too nervous to crack open?
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