My old boss told me to archive every single webpage I designed, and I rolled my eyes so hard

Back in 2004 I worked at a tiny web design shop in Portland and my boss made us save complete copies of every site we launched on CD-Rs. I thought it was a huge waste of time and space since those disks only held 700MB each. Fast forward to last month when a client wanted to see their 2003 menu site and the Wayback Machine was missing half the images. I grabbed that dusty CD case from my garage and popped in disk number 3 and bam, everything loaded perfectly. Anyone else have a piece of old advice they laughed at but now swear by?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_mia1d ago

Why would anyone actually want to see their old ugly website from 2003? lol. Those sites were all terrible, full of Comic Sans and those stupid "under construction" GIFs. I'm pretty sure web archiving is just hoarding for people who cant let go of the past. The client should be embarrassed they even asked for that menu site, not grateful you dug it out of a CD. Plus, if its not on the Wayback Machine then maybe it was meant to disappear forever like the scrolling marquees and neon green backgrounds.

taylor.betty1d ago

Fair point, my own Geocities site from 2002 is probably still orbiting somewhere in cyberspace like space junk. I'd still cry if someone deleted it though.