PSA: AOL Hometown files still accessible via FTP
I had some AOL Hometown web sites which I made over 10 years ago. I had been intending to retrieve my files and finally cancel my AOL (what a shitty company) account (which I've had since 1995). But AOL (in their shitty style) decided to just shut down AOL Hometown with little notice to their members.
I called them up and was told my files were irretrievable and that many other customers had called to complain and were told the same thing. I was also told that there were no backups and that I could not speak to an engineer. They said they would send an email on my behalf to someone, but that they "could not disclose who". Fantastic.
Well, it turns out that the files are (for the time being) still there, after all. For anyone in a similar situation, you can access your FTP files by logging into your AOL account normally, then using a third-party FTP client and connecting to ftp.hometown.aol.com with your regular AOL username (all lowercase) and password. Better do it quick, though.
Well, I guess I finally have an excuse to spend those 10 minutes I've been trying to find for years to cancel my AOL account. Thanks AOL!
Comments
I am trying this method and it does not seem to be working. I also had an old webpage where I kept all my old drawings at. I never once thought I'd need to back them up, but hey, I rarely looked at said drawings. Now, here I am, applying for college at an art technical place and I want the darn drawings and hey-- guess what-- I find out I'm just in time to get F***ed by AOHell.
Any ideas on if they just took down the server or something? I am just using FileZilla and I am getting these errors:
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Status: Resolving address of ftp.hometown.aol.com
Status: Connecting to 205.188.226.217:21...
Status: Connection established, waiting for welcome message...
Response: 220 htmbrn-d03 FTP server (Version wu-2.4(1) Wed Dec 1 12:08:04 EST 2004) ready.
Command: USER violintides
Response: 331 Password required for violintides.
Command: PASS ********
Response: 530 Authentication process not accessible. Try again later.
Error: Could not connect to server
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I am using Port 21... my password is DEFINITELY right...
Any help in this would be appreciated.... does anyone know any way to download the images still? I really only wanted my pictures...
Hi,
You can try archive.org and see what you can recover.
What ever files you had there on year 2007 can be seen by archive.org, anything you have done this year, 2008, you will have to wait till next year 2009 which is only days away before you can access the "archived" archives there.
Even tho you wont have FTP access, you will only be able to see your pages as it was seen back then. For the pictures you are only a "Right Click and Copy" away from recovering (saving) them. For the content of the pages just do a right click on Firefox and click on View Page Source from the menu and save it using Notepad
Good luck in getting your files back
Amanda, did you make sure to log onto AOL using the AOL client before trying to connect to the FTP server with FileZilla?
Thanks for the advice, I tried both things though.
FranciscoNET, I have tried looking up hometown.aol.com/violintides and any other version of it that it might have on there (i.e. hometown.aol.com/violintides/index.html or /main.html etc).... nothing shows up on the WayBack Machine.
David, I am logged into AOL via the 5.0 client. I don't think the client type makes any difference, but I will try it using AOL 9.0 also....
I keep getting the same error....
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Response: 530 Authentication process not accessible. Try again later.
Error: Could not connect to server
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Yeah I just spent 30 minutes waiting then another 10 minutes talking to the terrible AOL support.....
They keep saying the files are inaccessible. I spoke to a supervisor and got HIS supervisor's email address.
Here's to hoping that someone somewhere has a back-up.
Hopefully.
Amanda, I don't understand, I though that archive.org indexes the entire internet so you can see how any particular website looked like in any year you pick going down to 1996. I would be surprised if archive.org didn't bother to index pages from hometown.aol.com OR most likely AOL implemented the EXCLUSION command in its robots.txt for which could have caused archive.org to not index any hometown pages.
I would say to give archive.org more time and check back later on a different date to see if you can see the archived version of your website.
Another hint, have you tried checking got Google.com's "cached" version of your pages?
I have tried
http://hometown.aol.com/violintides/index.html
and
http://hometown.aol.com/violintides
and nothing came up in any Google search. But you may want to try any other pages (variations) within the same domain, it might be there.
But the fact that http://hometown.aol.com/violintides did not show up a single Google search results indicates most likely that there MAY have been the robotx.txt exclusion implemented by AOL, and if they did that then I wouldn't understand why would they create such as command, maybe at that time they were in a budget and didn't want too many visitors accessing member's pages as to save bandwidth, so they may have created the robots.txt exclusion command stooping any kind of indexing to save them bandwidth. \
Again, I cannot prove that they did in fact created the exclusion command with the robots.txt, but all indications does point out that they may have done so. That's why may not be getting that lucky with archive.org, google.com, etc, etc...
Francisco, there are some inaccuracies in what you said:
1. Archive.org stores *much of* the web, but not all of it. (Though yes, there does seem to be a significant delay until a snapshot is viewable to the public, so it's worth checking back periodically for the next year or so).
2. Google updates its indexes very quickly, so the lack of search results for a page that has been missing for months is completely unsurprising and says nothing about the robots.txt file for the corresponding site. In particular, I know Google searches would sometimes return hits to my own AOL Hometown sites.
You can access the aol hometown pages via Archive.org it does work Just type in the url where it says wayback machine example, http://hometown.aol.com/syrchancelot/
