West of the Moon is Down :(

[wallace_trust]

Fortunately, this beautiful fanfic site is backed up on the Internet Archive here.

What a vivid reminder of the cardinal rule of computing:  Always Have a Backup!!  :)

Comments

[shirebound]

I'm so grateful to know about the 'back door' to this wonderful site. Some very treasured stories are archived there and nowhere else.

[wallace_trust]

Yes, the site is 'precious' to me as well. It's my favorite of all fanfic sites. I'm hoping that the site owner can be reached and am volunteering, if necessary, to help move the whole thing to AO3.

[baranduin]

Oh that's good you found it!

Never was a site for me since it's Frodo/Sam but I'm glad you found it and hope you can get in touch with the owner. Feel free to sign me up as a volunteer for transport to AO3 (they have procedures in place to import sites).

[wallace_trust]

The Internet Archive is a wonderful thing! :)

WoTM has other subjects besides Frodo/Sam, enough that it has an index of pairings. Thank you for volunteering your time, if necessary, to help move it to AO3. I haven't tried to get in touch with the owner yet, as others are better acquainted with them. We'll see what happens!

[lbilover]

WotM actually wasn't a Frodo/Sam site. It had a separate gen section, plus all kinds of hobbit slash pairings. Not sure how it came to be thought of as only Frodo/Sam, although granted it was the main pairing. FYI, Mews has some of her wonderful gen LOTR fic archived there.

[claudia603]

huh, I had forgotten that some of my stories were there, too!

Thanks for this link. For some reason I couldn't get the story links to work on another link to it but this one seems to work!

How long do wayback links last? Do they ever just go away at some point?

[wallace_trust]

You're welcome! The Archive isn't very intuitive. It's easy to miss some of the links. When you're trying to find something in there, click on everything-- even the graphs have live links.

How long will it last? I doubt anybody knows, but I always treat 'precious' data like it won't be there tomorrow. All it takes to obliterate it is a virus or a power issue, or a natural disaster. I highly recommend downloading your stories and anything else that you treasure. For the most permanent storage, burn your stories to Blu-Ray.

Here's a very interesting article on how the Wayback folks are trying to preserve the Archive from 45 and his deplorables:

https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/29/13778188/internet-archive-of-canada-backup-trump-surveillance-censorship