Just realized my old Geocities site disappeared for good

I went back to find a page I made in 1999 about how to fix a carburetor and it took me 3 hours of digging through the Wayback Machine to even find a broken copy. The last mirror of it vanished back in 2018 and nobody told me. Anyone else lose a page they wish they had saved?

2 comments

2 Comments

coleman.christopher10d ago

Man, that carburetor page story hits close to home. I had a Geocities site dedicated to my cat, Mr. Whiskers, with a bunch of photos and even a little diary about his funny habits. I remember one page had this really specific trick I taught him where he'd sit before getting fed, and it was documented step by step with terrible 90s web graphics. The whole thing just poofed one day around 2010 and I only found out because a friend asked to see Mr. Whiskers' "famous" trick. What gets me is people don't talk enough about how these old sites didn't just hold information, they held pieces of who we were back then, like digital time capsules. Wayback Machine is great but it feels like visiting a graveyard sometimes, you know?

dixon.daniel10d ago

Grab WARC files from the Wayback Machine next time, they let you download the whole site in one go. I lost a forum guide from 2003 and learned that trick the hard way.