The race to preserve (almost) everything on Google+ before it shuts down

Archivists are racing to preserve Google+ before it shuts down next month.

In a post on Reddit, the Archive Team announced its mission to preserve and backup Google+ content to the Internet Archive. Google will commence the shutdown of its failed social network project on April 2.

According to the archivists, only public Google+ posts will be saved. Private posts and posts that have previously been deleted will not be archived. If a Google+ user does not want their content archived, the team behind the project recommends putting in a request to remove specific pages with the Internet Archive.

There are some technical limitations to even what public content will be archived. The Archive Team says that all comments on a page may not be archived because Google+ only displays a subset of a post’s comments as static HTML.

Multimedia, such as images and videos, specifically high definition content, will not be preserved at full resolution.

Google announced the end of Google+ in the wake of two separate security breaches last year related to the company’s failed social experiment. The platform never really took off — and certainly was no competition for Facebook. Former Google employees who worked on the project have since shared their first person accounts of how Google+ was seemingly destined to fail.

Google+ users and internet archivists interested in learning more or possibly helping with the archival project can check out the Reddit post here.