Archiveteam Saves 272 Terabytes of MobileMe Websites From Deletion

MacRumors said:

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A volunteer team has been downloading the entire publicly accessible contents of MobileMe webpages, iDisk folders, and photo galleries, ahead of the shutdown of the MobileMe service on June 30.

The team just finished the project, some four days ahead of their deadline. The project began late last yearn and ramped up as the team moved closer to the MobileMe shutdown date.

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The Archive Team bills themselves as "a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage." Among other things, the group offers a torrent with 641GB of Geocities sites and a scrape of 90 million tweets across 6 million Twitter accounts.

The group is not affiliated with website storing service Archive.org, but does work with them to preserve data.

Article Link: Archiveteam Saves 272 Terabytes of MobileMe Websites From Deletion

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Pretty cool idea

Well done Archive Team.

Perhaps I should have been a little more careful about what I put in Public in iDisk!!!

Yeah, truly mixed feelings there, but if you put something on the internet - you really should assume it's public forever...

sananda said:

Perhaps I should have been a little more careful about what I put in Public in iDisk!!!

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I don't use mobileme (did the trial), but that's exactly what I was thinking.

That's really great, I keep thinking about how unfortunate it is that all of this stuff is going to be deleted.

Also, I'm still using Snow Leopard with MobileMe for contacts & calendars, and I really don't know what I'm going to do come June 30th. Probably just go back to USB sync. (Actually, for calendars, I'll probably use the iCloud/Snow Leopard iCal hack.)

Just out of curiosity is this legal?

Perhaps the people left their stuff to be deleted because they didn't give a crap.
Now 272TB is wasted space because no one will every give a crap of looking at it.

AppleDApp said:

Just out of curiosity is this legal?

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Yes. If you put it out there, anyone can go see it.

It's like putting a notice on a public bulletin board. Can anyone go and take a photograph of it? Sure.

business model?

How much do they charge to get your files back?

jlgolson said:

Yes. If you put it out there, anyone can go see it.

It's like putting a notice on a public bulletin board. Can anyone go and take a photograph of it? Sure.

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So this was on a public cloud?

I wonder if they'll allow previous MobileMe users to download any data they missed on downloading - or requesting their information be deleted.

I know I have a few private MobileMe galleries that are either unlisted or Password protected. I'm kind of curious if they had access to those, if so I don't want them in their hands. There is nothing bad there, just family home videos, but still they were protected to a degree.

But I do like the idea. There are a lot of old programs and guides online that were created back in the day with iTools and that were migrated to .Mac (Like Steve's own old sample homepage) and again to MobileMe. So i do agree it's important to archive it.

The question is how they will make it available.

AppleDApp said:

So this was on a public cloud?

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It was in the "public" folder of your account. If you put something in there that was your way of acknowledging that you wanted to make it available to the entire world.

AppleDApp said:

Just out of curiosity is this legal?

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Depending on local laws, possibly not. Could be considered mass copyright violation (remember in many countries the moment you wrote it you have protection on it) or at least privacy violations since they distribute everything en masse.

LimeiBook86 said:

I wonder if they'll allow previous MobileMe users to download any data they missed on downloading - or requesting their information be deleted.

I know I have a few private MobileMe galleries that are either unlisted or Password protected. I'm kind of curious if they had access to those, if so I don't want them in their hands. There is nothing bad there, just family home videos, but still they were protected to a degree.

But I do like the idea. There are a lot of old programs and guides online that were created back in the day with iTools and that were migrated to .Mac (Like Steve's own old sample homepage) and again to MobileMe. So i do agree it's important to archive it.

The question is how they will make it available.

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I think they're only getting stuff from the public folder. Otherwise they would have to hack your password. Which as we know is against the law. Something Archive.org won't do.

Softreset said:

It was in the "public" folder of your account. If you put something in there that was your way of acknowledging that you wanted to make it available to the entire world.

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catch is that there was never an index of public folders from iDisk. Folks had to have your user name to get to your folder which means it wasn't exactly a public bulletin board. More like the board in a secured break room at work.

and that detail could be important if someone decides to sue them

Great

Yet another reason why I don't put my crap in the cloud.

There is no need for this. There is no public content on anyone's iDisk that should still need to be downloaded and "saved" at this point.

Where did they get the list of user names from? Just 'trial and error' ?

LimeiBook86 said:

The question is how they will make it available.

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They probably will make it available for something like $10/GB and apple gets 33% of the cut. I am sure they didn't do this out of the kindness of their hearts. Unless they are in it for the potential homemade porn.

Thanks, Archive Team!
Too bad I don't want any of mine back, so you are welcome to keep it all. But thanks!

Wouldn't it be cool if they drove a truck full of SAN racks and the mother of all connections right up to an Apple server farm and just download it all uber-rapidly?

Rocketman

ericrwalker said:

They probably will make it available for something like $10/GB and apple gets 33% of the cut. I am sure they didn't do this out of the kindness of their hearts. Unless they are in it for the potential homemade porn.

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errrr.... don't think so. They will rather torrent it and you can grab it. It's about preservation, more like building a platform for future achiologists.

See it this way: A couple decades away, old web pages are a snapshot of a generation already burried and partially forgotten. My grandkids might want to read an email my father wrote - be it as benign as can be - just to see some trace of their ancestor. I mean, most people wouldn't throw away a letter they got from their family 80 years old. It's a part of our own history.
Same here. We are witnessing the birth of the cloud age - if it will ever be that - or maybe just the brief period of it. Who knows what sociologists and other nutheads a couple of decades from now might learn about us in the Now. (PS: the nutheads is just to make fun of my brother wo is doing his doctorates in Sociology right now)

Softreset said:

It was in the "public" folder of your account. If you put something in there that was your way of acknowledging that you wanted to make it available to the entire world.

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True. But you know there will be some users who didn't know any better. And put stuff that shouldn't be public in their public folder without realising.

RTP.