💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 10-02.gmi captured on 2023-11-04 at 11:40:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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adiabatic writes,
While bookmarks of individual pages are nice, if there’s an article or something on Geminispace that you want to be able to refer back to, you should probably save it to your hard drive instead of expecting it to just be there months or years later. People get tired of hosting stuff for $8/month plus whatever the domain registration takes per year. Or they reinstall the OS on their Raspberry Pi machines, and forget that they were running Jetforce or something like that.
This is true. Whether it's due to neglect or disinterest or just leaving in a huff, a lot of stuff in Geminispace just...vanishes. I don't know whether having something like the Wayback Machine for Gemini would be good or not. There's some part of me that's really conflicted. My earliest websites are gone forever. They were awful. I was awful. But I wish I could get at them again.
I have a lot of regret that my earlier work is gone. This was in the days well before git, when svn hadn't even hit the scene. *-as-a-Service wasn't even a thought. You backed up to floppy, later to USB, or maybe not at all. Total data loss wasn't uncommon. I have some of that work, some early poems, some assembly code I wrote in 2000 for an undergraduate class, some prolog to solve the N-Queens problem a year later, and that's it.
Since then, I've been meticulous about backing up my work. Local hard drive, GitHub, periodically elsewhere. I've managed to extract my entire decade+ LiveJournal. I've scoured the Wayback and found my HTML journal I kept from 1999-2001 - this required remembering four separate URLs, one of which I'd forgotten, and only found/remembered due to a backlink from one of my friends. All of this is now in git, and I come back to it periodically, to remember what I was writing about during that period. What was important. Who. I'd implore you to back up what you're doing, because you'll regret it if it goes.
For my Gemini presence here, I periodically download everything, push it to a private GitHub repo. It's been a few weeks since I've done that; I'll do it again after this post. Decades online have shown me that it's really important to back up your work, because you might not care now, but you probably will later. And if you're not diligent, future you will be frustrated at your current self, lamenting all the work and writing you thought were unimportant and which subsequently have been lost forever.