Watching tens of thousands of documents disappear before your eyes while you’re in the process of using them … Yes, that is what happened to me.
My next paper is part of a pet project I’ve been working on on and off for years, now; it explores distributed computing from various angles: open innovation, scientific practice, the public engagement with science and so on.
One of the distributed computing projects I am studying used a forum for communication, a very active one where both the scientists running the project and the participants posted for years. It contained lots and lots of posts, a very good source for writing the (recent) history of one of the major distributed computing projects.
Then it just disappeared. It seems there was a software glitch, a problem with the database of some kind; lack of backups made it impossible to restore it. The forum was not run by the scientists but by hobbyists connected with the project.
I’ve written to people running the forum, but it seems to be a rather farfetched hope that it will ever be published again.
Fortunately, I had saved a number of documents of importance to the kinds of questions I am working with locally, on my harddrive.
Tip: there are software that helps with downloading sites; for the Mac, Sitesucker.
