The precarious state of classic software and hardware preservation

[Paul Koning]

> On Nov 20, 2021, at 2:06 PM, Antonio Carlini via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> On 20/11/2021 18:46, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
>> Is there an archive.org mirror? 
> 
> How many of us could afford the disk space? 30PB in 2016 apparently. I know that 10 years from now we'll all have PB drives, but right now it would be hard. That's 8 years of downloading @ 1Gbps. So I suspect that none of us has an archive.org mirror.
> 
> 
>> What about Wikipedia? There's Infogalactic, but that's a fork, not a mirror.
> 
> You can download a copy of Wikipedia and set up a local copy - it's probably bigger now but when I tried it, it was about 3GB.

Is that all?  What about the graphics?  And all the languages?  Infogalactic is a fork only of the English Wikipedia, which is admittedly the biggest one but certainly insufficient by itself.  I've encountered a number of articles that are far better covered in, say, the German edition than in the English one.  Sumerian is an example.

As for Werner's comment about SVN mirroring, I was unclear.  Yes, I know you can mirror Subversion, or more precisely, the repository admin can set up remote backups for it.  The nice thing about web based archives is that you can mirror them on your own initiative, at least moderately well.  Quite well if they are structurally simple, like bitsavers.  

I have a few open source projects for which I keep the material on my own Subversion server.  One is mirrored; the others aren't.  I'd be happy to let someone mirror them if desired.  And I've wondered if I should move them to Github to make them more visible and automatically mirrored.

	paul