Google Will Save Videos After All

don9030582 writes "After Google announced it would permanently shutter its Google Videos collection, dozens of volunteers from around the world sprung into action in a massive effort to make a copy of the entire site. It was originally slated to go dark on April 29th, but now they have eliminated any such deadline and furthermore they will be migrating the collection to YouTube. We wish Google would have planned to do that from the beginning, but ultimately this is a victory for the preservation of user-generated content on the Internet."

Comments

Evil Google

[pixline]

Damn you Google: I spent last weeks sucking videos and wasting bandwith FOR WHAT? Time to send me that Nexus as a compensation, at least.

Re:Evil Google

[pixline]

I would love to see you $600+ internet bill!

Send me the Nexus and I'll send you back the bill, deal?

Google wanted to restore faith in the cloud

[elucido]

Nothing could have diminished faith in the cloud more than to delete years worth of content overnight from the cloud.

It was a dumb idea to even discuss deleting it forever when Google wants us to trust them to host the data forever.

Re:Google wanted to restore faith in the cloud

[LordLimecat]

Not if you pay for it. Only free "clouds" have this limitation. Paid "cloud" can be governed by SLAs and contracts; only a bankruptcy might throw a wrench of the "all your data gone with no recourse" sort into things.

Re:Google wanted to restore faith in the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're upset over the possible loss of rare Google Videos content, but not the hundreds of thousands of ~pre-2007 YouTube videos which are deleted every day?

There used to be some good shit on YouTube. It's mostly all gone now.

Re:Google responds to the community

[Anonymous Coward]

To just erase years worth of content is just stupid.

Google does just that with YouTube. Much of the early-days classic videos were automatically purged - unless it was on some top-100 list or something then most videos from e.g 2005 or 2006 are just gone.

Take it to the ballot box

[tepples]

but hell, why should I be disallowed to?

Because you and millions of others like you continue to vote for legislatures that continue to allow this to happen.

Re:Google responds to the community

[bill_mcgonigle]

How much community is there when "volunteers from around the world" adds up to "dozens".

Those were the people doing the downloading. There were thousands more who were telling Google not to be stupid.

Home and small business "SLAs"

[tepples]

Only free "clouds" have this limitation. Paid "cloud" can be governed by SLAs and contracts

Home and small business "SLAs" for paid hosted services are best effort only, and the "contract" for home and small business tiers stipulates only that the provider must refund the service for the rest of the period.

Vimeo's non-commercial policy and video games

[tepples]

The problem with Vimeo is that it doesn't appear to want, say, videos about video games. If you developed the depicted game or obtained permission to post a video, it's "commercial use"; if not, it's copyright infringement. Start here; if you want more citations, I can provide them.

I got the entire letter "G"

[psydad]

I spent 4 days downloading the letter "G" - over 29GB of data. Spent 4 days rsync-ing it back up to the archive server. It's nice to know that a bit of history has been saved. I can't judge its merits - to me it was a bunch of silly videos, but who am I to judge...