written by Martin on Feb 10, 2011 Comments Off
Amateur archivist saves 172 BBC websites from oblivion
Ben Goldacre has taken steps to preserve 172 websites that the BBC has arbitrarily decided to delete as part of a cost-cutting exercise.
He purchased a $3.99 ‘low end box’ type VPS server and began the crawl of the BBC servers, capturing the content of the doomed websites and making them available in a torrent file for people to download and distribute, thereby ensuring that the publicly-funded content is still available, somewhere.
In actual fact, it would have cost very little to retain the websites – other than the miniscule traffic bandwidth the sites might incur. It’s claimed the deletions of the sites is part of a rationalisation process of trimming down the overall scale of bbc.co.uk.