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Thrifty, Anonymous Benefactor Backs Up BBC Websites Before They Go Dark

Posted by timothy on from the slurp-and-emit dept.

revealingheart writes "The BBC is set to close down 200 of its websites in the near future as part of cost-cutting measures. Hearing that 172 of these sites would be deleted from the Web entirely, an anonymous individual has taken matters into his or her own hands. The result is a BitTorrent file that anyone can download to store a backup of these 'lost' websites forever. The cost of the project? Apparently no more than $3.99 for a VPS server to crawl and retrieve all the sites."

3 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. What I want to know.... by MrQuacker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is how many millions of pounds were spent developing all those sites.

    1. Re:What I want to know.... by commodore64_love · · Score: 5, Interesting

      BBC has a real problem understanding the concept of "archiving". For some reason they think just because they are done with the sites, nobody else wants them either, so just erase them.

      It's somewhat similar to how they destroyed 1950s and 60s television tapes.

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      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  2. Re:Real reason the BBC is cutting back online by moonbender · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The same thing is going on in Germany. Our public broadcasting system was modeled after the BBC. The same huge media lobby groups comically defending independent journalism (yeah, right).

    As a result, the public broadcasters now have a list of criteria that everything they publish online has to conform with; the list is narrow enough that they're required to remove a huge amount of stuff from the archives -- aparently as much as 80%. They're also constantly under fire for everything they introduce, eg. smartphone apps. There was an effort to mirror data before it was deleted (@depub), but all the domains are dead, nobody seems to really know what happened to it. Couldn't find a torrent on the Pirate Bay, either.

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