A quick PSA on browser bookmarks and resources long term.

[Angular Chap]

No doubt many people on here have a vast collection of browser bookmarks with sites, pages, articles, podcasts and videos, be it Autism or special interest related. I'd like to put forward a quick PSA about keeping these resources safe long term.

A couple of weeks a ago, I went to post a link to a site for a forum member, but the page had been moved and the archive was locked and now needs medical credentials to access. A few days later, I had the same problem with a useful page I had bookmarked being moved. Then it happened a third time.

The old adage of once something is on the internet, it is there forever is no longer true, things can move around and disappear for many different reasons and we can no longer rely on the convenience of simple bookmarks long term.

I would like to recommend saving useful pages for offline use (Ctrl-S on most browsers, or File -> Save Page As...) or for an entire site, use one of the many free tools you can find using any search engine.

The same thing applies to videos. There are many add-ons, apps and sites that can download YouTube videos for offline viewing and safe storage long term.

This is far more inconvenient than just bookmarking a page, but it is also far better than permanently losing useful resources.

 

[Raggamuffin]

Can you not try copying the URL links of the bookmarks and using the Way Back Machine on the Archive.org website.

Ed

 

[Angular Chap]

Can you not try copying the URL links of the bookmarks and using the Way Back Machine on the Archive.org website.

Yes, it's a great suggestion, I've had about a 70% success rate so far going through the gaps in my collection using the Wayback Machine. Shame even that isn't perfect.