Lesson Learnt

[chameleon]

When you find something of interest, how many of you save it as a link, in favourites for example?I know I do. I recalled a report I read by Yorkshire Water a while ago which had information which would help in researching another topic. The link is there, it's there on Google too, but rather than opening a specific PDF it takes you to the Company Home page.An enquiry reveals that the YW website was replaced just a month ago - and such items were deleted seemingly without any thought to preserving the information in a back-up archive. (Ironically their house-keeping was incomplete, an HTML version still persists but does not contain the plans I wanted!).I think the wide spread view is that the Internet is becoming a source of all knowledge for and with everything - clearly a false security for the information we seek will only subsist for as long as its keepers decide to leave it there.The moral seems to be, if you want it again, make a copy!

[simong]

Oh, very much so. I do this sort of thing for money and it's a major issue these days. There might be a copy of what you're looking for Google's cache or in the Wayback Machine (www.archive.org) but there isn't a consistent way of saving a lot of stuff and the only answer is really to back it up yourself.