Archiving information, was Re: ADM-3A question

[Paul Koning]

> On Aug 16, 2019, at 6:14 AM, Steven M Jones via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> On 08/15/2019 23:21, Noel Chiappa via cctalk wrote:
>> I have on several occasions posted appeals to this list for people to
>> contribute content to it, and gotten almost no response (with one notable
>> exception), in terms of added content; that was a large part of why I merely
>> mentioned it in an offhand way.
> 
> I don't want to discourage anybody from contributing to this or any other project. However...
> 
> Imagine if you will that many people, over many years, put a lot of work into pulling information together on a site with forums, and then distilling that information into a lot of wiki pages. Many discussions in the forums, with hard-won facts and interesting projects documented there. Things the manufacturer(s) never admitted you could do! So many wiki pages carefully explaining things, recording specifications, procedures, configurations, part numbers, substitutions. An incredibly useful resource and a very active community.
> 
> Then imagine that a law is passed in a far away land, and the site owner decides it's is too risky to bother with, and they then take the entire site down - wiki and fora - with no warning and no access to the material...

You don't even have to assume government malice.  Lots of providers have gone out of business without any warning simply because of not being economically viable.  Or even because the operators decided they weren't interested any longer.

Anything worth having around deserves backup.  Which makes me wonder -- how is Wikipedia backed up?  I guess it has a fork, which isn't quite the same thing.  I know Bitsavers is replicated in a number of places.  And one argument in favor of GIT is that every workspace is a full backup of the original, history and all.

One should worry for smaller scale efforts, though.

	paul