(Mis)Uses of Technology

(Mis)Uses of Technology

by Mike Masnick




Google Cache Saves The Day

from the accidental-backup dept

It's important to backup your website, right? Well, maybe not as important any more. Here's a story about a guy who lost both the original and a backup of his weblog due to coincidental hard drive failures of both his local machine and his server, but was able to rebuild it thanks to Google's cache storing all 400 pages. That's pretty impressive. Google's cache is one of its features that's rarely talked about, but which I've found to be useful many times. There's an amusing quote from a Google spokesperson saying that people should forget expensive backup solutions and just rely on Google.

2 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
 

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    Jan 15th, 2001 @ 8:00pm
  • is this legal???

    by mhh5

    So what sort of sites can google cache? Can they cahce, for instance, any copyright material? I've always wondered how they can "steal" content and keep it and re-broadcast it later, legally....

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

    • Feb 24th, 2003 @ 2:44am
    • Re: is this legal???

      by The Subway Depot

      I share your worries. It was recently when running through the log-file of my HTTP-server, when I noticed that a strange IP appeared in it that every time after a page, called for a "Robots.txt". Then I noticed that it was just scanning all my available/shared HTML-documents.

      Now I want to be clear: So far I haven;t "posted" any information I wouldn't want others to "obtain" or re-use, but still (in my humble opinion), I think it's outrageous that ANY connecting group (media) will "copy"/"borrow"/"store"/"keep" MY personally typed information, which is intended for READING purposes and NOT for flowing to somebody's personal data-storage...

      Why put it online? Example: I have a big collection of photo's of vehicles of a company I work for. Just for viewing. I can cope/agree with that people save any of that "nice looking" vehciles, like I keep for personal use pictures to. But that my documents will be in some kind of public domain or library, I don't feel so comfortable with that.

      So, individual content-storage is not any of my concerns, but that one big "company" (which should stick with it's original task: locate information (rather than store it!)) starts taking 100% copies of original (copyrighted) material/content, I think it should be judged "ILLEGAL" access...

      (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

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