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The Archive Team is committed to preserving websites upon which a virtual axe is about to fall, a fate that awaits GeoCities after its owner, Yahoo, decided to cut its losses on the $4 billion it paid for the web hosting service.

The team's boss, Jason Scott, said that following his initial call for help he quickly garnered enough bandwidth, disk space and coding expertise to begin the process of downloading that vast amount of data on the GeoCities servers.

"We've been downloading at an enormous rate, probably along the lines of a gigabyte a half-hour of Geocities, through all our different vectors," he wrote

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on his ASCII blog. "Because we're talking literally millions of files with an average size of 1 to 30 kilobytes, it becomes harder and harder to get a 'big picture' view of everything we've grabbed, but after 48 hours of work, Archive Team has saved over 200,000 Geocities sites. We??re now pulling in new sites at the rate of something like 5 a second."

He adds that it remains to be seen whether that is fast enough. Yahoo has only said that it will pull the plug "later this year".

Some material has already disappeared. While Scott is confident that every existing site from 1999 and earlier has been saved, his team has discovered that some GeoCities Neighbourhoods, its name for sub-domains, have been wiped.

As for what happens to that data that is saved, Scott is undecided.

"It is more important to me to grab the data than to figure out how to serve it later. People who have been talking about copyright and stuff seem to think I'm going to sell it or take credit or some crap. I don't see how the final collection won't end up online, but how is elusive - maybe a torrent of a bunch of zip files, or as a curated collection, or as a bunch of hard drives. However it is, I'll make sure people can get it, somehow."

The Archive Team can be found at archiveteam.org.