Best California, Utah and Nevada Paleo Website Back: How To Archive Websites For Posterity

[DPS Ammonite]

The apparent demise of the best California, Utah and Nevada area paleontology website is premature. Inyo.coffeecup.com (created by a former TFF member) is up and running. Check out his great write ups with pictures about trips to many sites many now under protection by state and Federal governments.   http://inyo.coffeecup.com/site/cf/carfieldtrip.html#fossilspages  Download his fieldtrip guide: http://inyo.coffeecup.com/site/fieldtripbook.pdf

 

Here are two of my favorites sites:

Red Rock Canyon State Park in the California Mohave desert  http://inyo.coffeecup.com/site/redrock/redrockfossils.html

and see the magnificent silicified insects from the Miocene lake deposits near Barstow, CA  http://inyo.coffeecup.com/site/barstowfossils/barstowfossils.html

 

Thanks to TFF member @John for alerting us that his wonderful website was down.

 

In a related matter, I would hate to see Inyo.coffeecup.com dissapear if the creator is incapacitated or runs out of money to support the site. Besides The Internet Archive AKA The Wayback Machine, I wonder if any institutions would be willing to archive a version for posterity. Books are archived in libraries; where should websites be saved? I wonder if The Fossil Forum would be willing to archeive copies of significant paleontology websites. Have we made plans to carry on and archive The Fossil Forum in case disaster strikes? Maybe geology libraries and paleontology departments at colleges/universities should store and archeive quality paleontological websites.

 

Sometimes quality websites such as Mindat.org (minerals and occasion fossils) find institutions to preserve and support their continued operations. Mindat has Hudson Institute of Mineralogy, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. Has The Fossil Forum ever considered forming a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization to support our activities or finding an institution to partner with? As an added bonus donations to TFF would be tax deductable.

 

Cheers,

 

John

 

 

 

 

 

[Fossildude19]

Most web hosting services do perform regular backups of the websites they host, as a part of the service they provide.

These backups normally consist of tapes, or some other hard copy media, that are usually kept "off site" for continuity purposes in the event of catastrophic failure.

I would be very surprised if TFF was not being backed up regularly.

[Brett Breakin' Rocks]

11 hours ago, DPS Ammonite said:

The apparent demise of the best California, Utah and Nevada area paleontology website is premature. Inyo.coffeecup.com (created by a former TFF member) is up and running. Check out his great write ups with pictures about trips to many sites many now under protection by state and Federal governments.   http://inyo.coffeecup.com/site/cf/carfieldtrip.html#fossilspages  Download his fieldtrip guide: http://inyo.coffeecup.com/site/fieldtripbook.pdf

 

Here are two of my favorites sites:

Red Rock Canyon State Park in the California Mohave desert  http://inyo.coffeecup.com/site/redrock/redrockfossils.html

and see the magnificent silicified insects from the Miocene lake deposits near Barstow, CA  http://inyo.coffeecup.com/site/barstowfossils/barstowfossils.html

 

Thanks to TFF member @John for alerting us that his wonderful website was down.

 

In a related matter, I would hate to see Inyo.coffeecup.com dissapear if the creator is incapacitated or runs out of money to support the site. Besides The Internet Archive AKA The Wayback Machine, I wonder if any institutions would be willing to archive a version for posterity. Books are archived in libraries; where should websites be saved? I wonder if The Fossil Forum would be willing to archeive copies of significant paleontology websites. Have we made plans to carry on and archive The Fossil Forum in case disaster strikes? Maybe geology libraries and paleontology departments at colleges/universities should store and archeive quality paleontological websites.

 

Sometimes quality websites such as Mindat.org (minerals and occasion fossils) find institutions to preserve and support their continued operations. Mindat has Hudson Institute of Mineralogy, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. Has The Fossil Forum ever considered forming a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization to support our activities or finding an institution to partner with? As an added bonus donations to TFF would be tax deductable.

 

Cheers,

 

John

 

 

 

 

 

Hi John,

 

  When we had to make a hasty retreat from our server and hosting site GoDaddy, and switch to Squarespace I used a free piece of software called HTTrack Website copier to essentially copy the whole site to disk.  To pull it off of Godaddy seemed like an archaic interface nightmare. It's a great little time capsule of our site and didn't need any special permissions, and was easy to implement. 

 

  Super easy to use.

 

Cheers,

Brett

 

https://www.httrack.com/

 

To Quote"

HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility.

It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.

WinHTTrack is the Windows (from Windows 2000 to Windows 10 and above) release of HTTrack, and WebHTTrack the Linux/Unix/BSD release. See the download page.

[Shamalama]

Quite the expansive and education site. Thanks for the tip @DPS Ammonite!