Hi Ken,
Absolutely my pleasure. It took a bit of doing - Yahoo's servers are responding very slowly at the moment, mainly I think because there is a loosely coordinated, massive, global "confederation of geeks" trying to archive as much as possible before it all gets deleted. I was able to take the backup only because they have made their "geek majic" tools available and I speak just enough geek to have been able to puzzle through the right incarnations to get their stuff to function. From all accounts the official backup Y! offer members is terrible and "woefully incomplete". What we have is a better backup. So, anyway, everyone remember to hug a hacker today. They're the one who made this possible.
I'm hoping to do more with the backup in the near future. The archive of files and pictures is usable now, but the discussions - whilst in the backup - aren't preserved in a way that makes it easy to use. I'm aware of one tool that has been hacked together to "de-yahoo-ify" the format and convert it to something useful, so I'll put some time into that in the next week or so. The authors of the tool have stated that it isn't 100% though because Y! obfuscate the data somewhat.
I'm also going to try and figure out how (if) I can get the archive online and searchable through a web page. If I can pull that off I'll set it up and make it available.
Interesting to think that 10 - 15 years ago Groups was where Faceplant is now, but less ubiquitous. I think Y! deleting the archives is a tragedy. It is, honestly, inexcusable. They could easily have handed the complete archive over to
archive.org and none of this would be required. Instead, they burn the library of Alexandria all over again. (Although, yes, I know it was only a warehouse of scrolls that burned, and not the actual library, but the point remains intact...)
If anyone has any thoughts/requests/suggestions/questions/etc please let me know!
...for rescuing the data and making it available.
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Posted by: Blake Robertson <blake@connectra.com.au>
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