Geocities.com automatically backed up

If you had a geocities website and you didn't have the chance to retrieve it before geocities died, fear not!

For there is a someone who might have already done it for you - oocities.org

I was surprised to hear some of my colleagues discover my years old site on geocities, and that's how I got to know about it.

They seem to have proactively backed up all (or most) of geocities before it was taken down. The good news is that your data is still there. Not only did they back up and serving they pages, they also allow google to index them - and that's how I could found them.

You simply need to replace "geocities.com/..." with "www.oocities.org/..." and all your old pages will be there. Even the downloads (I tried some .zip files) work!

The bad news is that they do not support modifying anything there yet. So if you want to put a link to your current ventures, you cannot do it. From the FAQ:

For now, we are providing rather an archive and we are not able to give access to our servers for most active sites. But we will be glad to send you your files to enable you to upload and update them somewhere else and to make them available to a bigger audience than here.

You can delete it though, lest you really fear someone will see the embarrassing (ahem) attempts at taming the Internet from a much younger you. To delete something, you simply need to write to them.

We fully respect you copyright and will of course remove your interlectual property from the internet at our earliest convience. Just write a mail to oocities {AT} gmail {DOT} com and it will usually be gone within a few hours.

For me though, it was a nice surprise, and I am happy :) Here's to returning the good old days!

Thank you oocities.org!