Re: Yet Again, The Almighty Cloud.
I feel the same way. I've always made it a point to scrape all the documentation bits from any site I found useful just in case it suddenly goes away. I'll WGET a copy of the server, Zip it together for ease of archiving to another drive, & then leave the WGET files in a subdirectory with an appropriate name. That way if the network ever fails, the site goes away, or anything else happens to said docs then at least *I* have a local copy upon which to fall.
This practice proved its worth when my employer had me writing up a web site that would allow our in the field techs to dial in, look up any of the 2TiB of docs we retained, download them, & have the specs at hand for repairing the device in front of them. Our document server went TITSUP & my boss had a cow thinking that the broken RAID cards that took it down also wiped the data. Right up until I handed him a portable 4TiB drive with a copy of said server's data on it. It was a damn good thing I'd done it too, the RAID card *had* rendered it all FUBAR & the admin in charge of doing the backups had screwed the pooch. My drive was used to restore all the server's doc files & I got a nice fat envelop in gratitude.
If I ever find the site which I archived is no longer available, I contact the site admin to ask if they need their data back. I explain what I've done & why, then make it available to them to restore from if they need/want to. I've lost track of the number of times I get a phone call from some panicked admin that wants to buy me a pint in gratitude. Some call me a pirate for scraping their site, right up until I make it clear I don't offer the data up to anyone *except* the site admin in case of emergency. I know there's the Internet Archive that does a better job, but I'm not the IA & never intend to be.
I'm just a private citizen whom learned the hard way at an early age to Always. Make. Backups. Of. Critical. Data.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
