The Archive Team is hard at work in preserving public Google+ content before it goes down for good in April.
Made up of volunteers, the people behind this undertaking is caching the social network's data in the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine."
Archiving Google+
On Reddit (via The Verge), the Archive Team detailed all its plans, explaining that it's using scripts and the like to create a backup of the data in question.
As mentioned earlier, the group is preserving public posts, meaning content that have been set to private or delete will not be included in the project. By the same token, users whose posts are public might get their data cached in the Internet Archive.
Considering the time left until Google shutters the platform, the whole process may not be able to archive everything. As the team explains, Google+ lets each post contain up to 500 comments, "but only presents a subset of these as static HTML." In other words, long comment threads may not be completely backed up.
In addition, videos and images may not be stored at full resolution, which is something that photographers and the like might be interested to know of.
What This Means For Google+ Users
For Google+ users who wants to have their data preserved, then they don't have to do anything. They can even set their other private content to public if they want more of their data included.
On the other hand, those who want the opposite can go ahead and delete their content or profiles. The Archive Team also points out that users can also send in a request to the Internet Archive to delete specific content.
Scheduled Shutdown Of Google+
In October, Google said that it's closing down Google+, and on Feb. 4, it began restricting users from creating new profiles, as well as pages, communities, and events on the platform. Come April 2, the company will shut down the service and delete users' data in the network.
Google+ has been struggling to gain high engagement and usage rates. The shutdown makes sense in that context, but the straw that broke the camel's back was a major data leak that put user data at risk in October.
