Rant: Lost a whole site archive when my old GeoCities mirror drive died

Last month I fired up an old external hard drive from 2012 where I kept backups of all my favorite 90s fan sites. The thing clicked twice and went silent. I lost a complete mirror of a Zelda shrine page with hand-coded MIDI files and a guestbook full of 1997 comments. Did anyone else ever bother to save those old page mirrors or am I just hoarding digital junk?

2 comments

2 Comments

theagarcia12d ago

OMG SAME THING happened to me with my old Tripod backups. I had a whole archive of Sailor Moon fansites with custom cursors and guestbook entries from like 1996 where people were actually ROLEPLAYING as the characters in their messages. Drive died with a horrible grinding noise and I literally felt sick. It's not junk at all, those pages were genuine time capsules of how weird and wonderful the early web was.

ryanrodriguez12d ago

My buddy Chris had a whole archive of old Angelfire wrestling pages from like 1998, complete with guestbook responses from people who are probably dead by now. His hard drive died last year and he spent like two weeks trying to recover it with some sketchy software from a random forum. He got maybe 10% back and said it felt like losing a time capsule full of strangers.