Lost a whole Geocities tribute page about obscure 80s synth bands

I was trying to dig up this old fan page for a band called 'The Bell Ends' that had a bunch of rare live recordings and photos from their 1984 tour. The whole thing vanished when Yahoo shut Geocities down in 2009 and even Wayback Machine only has the index page saved without any of the actual media files. Why do we keep letting platforms delete entire archives of niche culture without giving people a proper heads up to save their stuff? Has anyone else had luck finding orphaned audio from those old pages or is it basically gone forever?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_amy9d agoTop Commenter

I had the same thing happen with a Geocities page about a local DIY punk scene from the 90s. What finally worked was emailing the Internet Archive directly and asking if they had any deeper backups, and they actually found a CD-R stash with some of the missing audio files. You might also try reaching out to old fans on forums or Facebook groups, someone out there probably saved those Bell Ends recordings on a dusty hard drive or a burned CD. It sucks that so much of that stuff is just gone, but sometimes the community still has copies floating around if you know where to ask.

betty1269d ago

Can't say I'd be emailing archives over some old demo tapes, @the_amy.