Gonna copy/paste the whole thing from Lee Williams:
Gannett just killed my old website: TheGunWriter.com and its entire archive.
Gone are eight years worth of stories, photos, videos and other gun-related content.
For a media company that claims it values local journalism, this is unconscionable.
They didn’t even let me know — no emails or phone calls. They just took it down.
To be clear, they can’t touch my new website — thegunwriter.substack.com — but the loss of eight years worth of hard work is difficult to accept, especially since there were folks featured in the stories who are no longer with us.
Also, and for me this is the worst, there were a lot of stories and profiles of veterans. I never knew Gannett had such disdain for this country’s veterans.
The decision was made by Maribel Perez Wadsworth, President of the USA TODAY Network and Publisher of USA TODAY at Gannett.
If you would like to send an email to Maribel and share your thoughts, click here.
If that link doesn’t work, her email is: maribel@gannett.com
As always, thanks for your time.
Lee
Their goal is to erase us both from real life and be nothing but memory dust.
The Internet never forget…neither do we.
I am against what they did, but do folks not have their original source material or any backups? What about trying archive.org?
Yeah, that was my first reaction. Always, ALWAYS make backups. Always. Two is one and one is none.
Others have said it, I’ll say it again – Backup yer stuff.
This wasn’t the first warning. If you use any service not your own, back it up.
Back it up in more places than one.
Back up either way. If your data is on someone else’s machine, you have to protect against host screwup, inadequate host backup, and against enemy action. If it’s on your own machine, you still have to protect against loss of your server, due to fire or theft or other disaster.
So back it up. Keep the backups in a separate spot, minimally in another building (a detached garage or barn, for example) or in a friend’s home across town. If it’s particularly critical or likely to come under enemy attack, try to keep a copy in another jurisdiction.
And yes, it is (for now) on archive.org. But keep in mind that archive.org has, at times, deleted stuff from its archives.
I wonder how hard it is to back up blogs and other kinds of web sites hosted by web hosting services. Clearly you’re on solid ground legally (unless the host has terms that involve handing over ownership of the content and you’re foolish enough to sign that). But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if typical hosting sites make it difficult to get good backups of the content.
There might be a business opportunity there. With not a whole lot more than “wget -r -np” you can make a fairly good backup, at least in the sense of having the content even though reconstructing it as a functioning web site might be more involved. Perhaps a potential service offering for Troglodyte? I wonder how many WordPress customers might want to do this as a precaution, for example.
BTW, I did what I just described to make a copy of Phil Luty’s “thehomegunsmith” web site. I’m fairly sure I’m not the only one who felt that one needed to be protected.
Check out the internet archive and/or the wayback machine. with either or both you sould be able to recover all of the public documents/images. drop me a line if i can help
Build a machine in your own home. Buy hard drives. Buy a host bus adapter. Create a RAID6 array. I use LSI Broadcom HBAs in both 8 port and 16 port flavors. The so called server is a 16 port with 2Tb disks. The so called desktop is an 8 port with 1Tb disks. Backup, backup, backup. SyncBackPro is the x64 program I use for that. Start small with hard drive purchases. The HBAs support online capacity expansion, and that is the basis for the start small rec. Grow your storage capacity as your needs expand.
I had a server in my house. It was a RAID array. Last summer, while working from home, I opened an email from my boss. That email executed an attachment. The payload was ransomware. Over the next two weeks, it infected my entire home network. Then it executed, all overnight. It encrypted everything- the primaries AND the backups.
My employer’s IT guys simply told me: “Not our problem.”
I lost everything. All of our data. Wedding pictures, files, everything. We were able to recover the files, but not any filenames. So now I have over half a million files with no names. We have to individually open each file, see what it is, and rename it. Even doing 4 files a minute for two hours a day, it will take three years to rename them all. It’s a huge job that we will likely never complete.
I now make a monthly offline backup. Nothing like closing the barn door after the livestock escapes.
Damn, that sucks major a$$.