I spent $400 trying to archive a Geocities site before it vanished for good

Back in 2022, I heard a specific fan site for a 90s cartoon was about to get wiped from its free host. I panicked and paid a service that promised a full, interactive backup with all its guestbooks and MIDI files. They sent me a zip file, but when I opened it, half the pages were broken images and none of the Perl scripts worked. The site was just a static snapshot, completely dead. I tried for weeks to get it running locally, even bought an old book on HTML 3.2, but it was useless. That $400 bought me a lesson in how fragile this old stuff really is. Has anyone had luck with a better tool for saving a whole site, not just pictures?

2 comments

2 Comments

rowanellis3d ago

Honestly, did you ever find out what that service actually used to make the backup?

kevin_roberts413d ago

My buddy had a similar nightmare trying to save his old band's Angelfire page. He used some free crawler tool that grabbed all the text, but it totally missed the embedded RealPlayer clips of their live shows. The worst part was the visitor counter, it just showed as a broken red "X" in the backup. He said it felt like a ghost town, all the life was sucked out. He never found a good fix either, just a folder of sad, silent HTML files.