Mar 18, 2019 at 4:48 PM Archive Team aiming to archive Google+ before its April 2nd shutdown
Google+ is going to shut down on April 2nd, with posts and other content being deleted from the service starting next month as well. In a bid to preserve the years of content that Google+ contains, the Internet Archive and the Archive Team are working together to save all of the content that they possibly can from the site.
In a post on the r/plexodus Reddit community, the process on how this amount of data is being saved in such a short period of time (as well as how individuals can potentially contribute) is detailed. The aim is also described succinctly in a "tl;dr" near the top:
"Most public Google+ content should live on at the Internet Archive thanks to a fanatical bunch of volunteers, and you can help."
Though this undertaking aims to cover all public content on the social network, there lies a few understandable caveats. Any posts that are marked as private or deleted will not be archived. In addition, though Google+ comment threads have a limit of 500 posts, only "a subset of these" are presented in an archive friendly static HTML. According to the Archive Team, "It’s not clear that long discussion threads will be preserved." In addition to these limits, photos and videos will not be saved at their full resolution.
Those interested in following the Archive Team's progress in saving all possible Google Plus content to the Internet Archive can follow their progress on a real-time dashboard.
