A while back I wrote a post about an old school website that I had built many, many years ago that was still available online. Since writing that post the site has - as I feared - finally disappeared from the Internet. I had a feeling it would, and I was looking at ways to preserve the work within it.
I have all the images, files and pages stored on an external hard drive at home and I recently backed all of those up within a dropbox account just in case the hard drive failed (they have done before, they will again I'm sure) and still plan at some point to re-publish the site as a reference to the school's early foray into online projects back in the 1990's.
Whilst I was backing those files up I also began to think about other projects I'd created and put online; projects I'd initiated for schools, projects I'd created during secondments, and projects created just for fun, and thought about what would happen if those projects were taken offline.
Reading Derek Robertson's blog post from early February about the fate of the excellent Consolarium project he had been involved in jolted me into rapid action with regards my projects, and I began to back up those projects that I could. Of course, some projects I have no control over (like Derek) and have to hope and pray that they remain online and don't simply vanish because someone presses a button one day when they want to refresh the look and style of a website. There are still a few other projects I'd really like to make sure I get backups of, but this is just the start. There is more to do.
Once I had backed up those sites, I also decided to make an online copy of those projects under my own control so that if the original site was to vanish, there would be an archive ready and waiting to point people towards if they asked where a project had gone.
And so that is why there is a new tab along the top of this site - up there, on the right, below the banner. See it? The one that says "Old Projects". It's listing nearly everything that I've tried to backup, and also those sites that I cannot backup for legal reasons, and also two sites that have already gone the way of the digital dodo and vanished.
I wasn't quick enough to get them all, but I've taken steps to make sure I've got the others covered.
How about the online projects you've created, or been involved in. Will you lose those to the ether, or is time you started preserving the past too?