Steve Hayes wrote: > On 14 May 2009 04:02:52 GMT, [email protected] (Brendan R. Wehrung) > wrote: > >> If you try to log onto GeoCites you'll see Yahoo's notice that you can't >> join any more and the service will be shut down later this year. >> >> As the home of many geneology projects, losing free GeoCities is a blow. >> >> Can anybody suggest another free web-hosting service that is likely to be >> around for a while? > > Yes, I will mourn the loss of Geocities. It's been around for a long time and > a lot of genealogical and historical information will vanish, never to be seen > again -- of course it happens every time a genealogist dies and the family is > not interested and throw all the research into the trash, but this will be a > whole lot disappearing at once, like in a tsunami. > > For more info about the Geocities closure and its implications see here: > > http://methodius.blogspot.com/2009/05/goodbye-geocities.html > > It's something genealogists, historians and others should be talking about -- > will it be possible to rescue anything? > > There are several other free webhosting sites, but they may suffer the same > problem. Times are tough, and people have less disposable income than they > used to. Genealogical research will be going on to the back burner, and people > will be asking whether they can afford subscriptions to genealogical > societies, or whether they can afford to make that research trip, whether they > can afford the subscription to ancestry.com (I've never been able to afford > it, so that doesn't affect me). > > A relation of ours lost all her genealogy and family histor information when > AOL did something similar a few months ago -- she wasn't computer savvy enough > to save it or move it to another host. And if you move it to another host the > same thing might happen there soon anyway. > > > > Although this refers to a 'free' hosting site the same is true of any site. The lesson to learn is *never* rely on a host site to keep your valuable research data, always keep a copy of data you have safetly on your own computer with secure backups in both removable media form and a hard copy on paper etc which in the worst case would enable you to recreate from scratch. Remember local copies in at least 2 locations offers more security should some disaster completely destroy one of those locations. My sister & I both keep copies of our mutual and individual data, she in Northamptonshire, UK & I in Florida, USA.