ftp archives disappearing?

Cameron Kaiser wrote: To be honest, I don't think a lot of archive maintainers make it clear that this is a perfectly acceptable thing to do and for users to ask for. Yes that's silly (that it should even be necessary), but I think for a lot of users it doesn't occur to them that this might be possible - it's probably a very good idea for archive maintainers to make this angle very clear on their site. It won't catch anything like everyone of course, but it'd probably go some way toward helping. And it's only five minutes' work. (e.g. I know Jay has said on here that he'd prefer people ask for media-based copies of classiccmp data rather than downloading huge amounts - but nowhere can I see on the bitsavers "home page" where it says this is the preferred way over large downloads) Oh, I'm trying to avoid the whole argument side of the discussion :) Within the context of *asking first* for the purposes of snapshotting / mirroring (as originally raised by hex star) it doesn't seem so terrible; within the context of everyday users killing someone's bandwidth by trying to download *everything* on a site it seems very discorteous. As an observer of this thread it seems there's a lot of arguing at cross-purposes going on :) (Actually, there's an interesting issue here: "modern" computer users generally seem to have very little concept of "how big" some piece of data is. We were all taught to know the limits of the medium, but that seems to have gone out the window these days. It actually wouldn't surprise me to find that half the people out there trying to suck down whole sites aren't driven by greed or lack of consideration, but simply because they don't appreciate that it's a *lot* of data they're dealing with) Anyway, I refuse to get drawn into this ;) cheers Jules