Datapocalypso (RE: Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse)

The good part is at the very end where he actually proposes some kind of solution.

I'm still not solid on what I think about private companies having the responsibility to provide your data for you if they're closing down, but his bit at the end about the archive team seems... well, brilliant. Hell, it could even be a paid service. Monitor the web for companies shutting down and download away. Of course, that's assuming that the data's not protected behind some sort of wall (if Facebook was closing, or something like that); in that case, contact the company and try and make a deal. You could get them to simply give you all the data, or (in case of privacy concerns, etc.) offer the closing company a solution where they commit to letting users get at their data for 90 days (or some similar number) and after that, you put up a page where people can pay to access the original site, or at least some sort of download page.

Of course, people could just back up, but some stuff is just hard to do that with, especially on the web.

On the other hand, perhaps it's good to allow data to be lost occasionally... I've lost old emails, source code, and other documents that I thought were really important (to me at least). Turns out I was wrong, I don't miss any of it.

It's a shame when people lose stuff for reasons other than neglect, but it happens. Start over or work on something new (and treat it like an opportunity, not a chore).

Cross-posting:

Of relevance, Pownce had a similar shutdown recently. Pownce was bought and users were given 2 weeks to export their data before the service was shutdown and the data gone forever.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/01/pownce-deadpooled-team-...

So losing the data you enter into some lame AOL web service because you forget to check your email for a few weeks qualifies as an apocalypse? After watching fat insane Brando in Apocalypse Now and buff ass-kicking Aaanold in the Terminator flicks, this "coming datapocalypse" doesn't seem very scary.

The biggest problem I have with websites like hometown that shut down with insuficiant notice is that burned users are less likely to trust new websites... And as a webapplication developper I care about having users trust me with their contents....

I fully support this idea and infact, I am already wondering how you'd go about implementing it.

I've been bitten by this before and didn't have sufficient backups.