Digital neglect

[gleemonk]

Over the past few years we've created a new version of a campaign website for NGO every year, archiving the old version so it was still accessible. We had campaign-foo.org archived to archive.ngo.org/2014/, campaign-bar.org archived to archive.ngo.org/2013/ and so forth. All of this lived in a directory archive next to www on the webserver. Last year we archived the page campaign-bleb.org the last time into archive/2015, and handed over the project to another company.

Fast forward 6 months, we tell our hoster to delete the ngo.org account, because all domains (including archive.ngo.org) point to a new webserver. Today - two weeks later - and we get a call from NGO, they're looking for their archives. Apparently they were not included on their new site.

Well. Err, we could phone up our hoster. They rummage through their backups and there it is, www. But the sibling dir archive is not in the backups, maybe they excluded it because it's called "archive"? ¯\(°_o)/¯ It's gone, looks like it never was there.

I search through my scratch space, and there are copies of the last archiving run 2015. So there is that. For the rest we referred them to archive.org ¯\_(ツ)_/¯