[REQUEST] Archive of the WinWorld library. Is it feasible?
I have massive amounts of storage available and am looking to build an archive of your library for preservation in the event it goes offline again. I'd imagine it was pretty hard on everyone during the renovation, and I found it nearly impossible to find another resource as excellent as WinWorld. I don't have much to offer in exchange, but I can host a temporary mirror in the event of server issues. I don't have much bandwidth (~5MBit/s upload), but I guess it's better than nothing. Is there any way to do this? Would it be too much of a strain on resources?
P.S. Thank you for consolidating all of this in one place. It has made my life much easier.
Comments
If you were serious about setting up a mirror, you would need to contact Calvin or Duff, but I haven't seen them around the forum lately. Still, you would need quite a bit of bandwidth to run a live mirror, especially if everyone were hitting it.
Similarly Calvin or Duff would also be the ones to grant any kind of server permissions to make a full copy over the internet. (Either that or snail mail me a hard drive :P )
It works for Amazon: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/snowball/latest/ug/whatissnowball.html
Thanks for responding. How large would this archive be? I can send up to ~3-5TB worth of drives at any given time and I have around 21TB available as of right now. I'd imagine my available bandwidth could be an issue, but bittorrent could be a solution. For preservation purposes, a set of torrents could keep WinWorld alive for decades if enough people seed to it.
Due to the age of the media, magnetic rot will eventually destroy any physical copies of the original software still in existence, so a decentralized self-sustaining solution would make a lot of sense. I can maintain a mirror of the library and start torrents for each piece of software. I would seed through HTTP via my archive and hopefully, if enough copies are downloaded, it would end up being self-maintained through the community. This could potentially remove a lot of load from your mirrors, and may even allow the software to remain far beyond our lifetimes. I’m not sure if this would raise any issues with the DMCA, but considering you all are hosting through HTTP, the rights holders probably aren’t filing too many takedowns…
I personally think it is incredibly important that this is preserved, as this old software is quite literally the foundation of modern computing. Keeping it around for future generations to enjoy seems like an important thing to do.
-Tyler
Edit: It turns out I missed something important. I am on a residential connection, and therefore probably can't host a "real" mirror. I would however like to have a copy of the library for storage as, due to the slow internet connection, it takes a very long time to download any piece of software I may end up needing. My offer to seed a group of torrent still stands, however.
Sorry for wasting your time, but I appreciate the response.
@SomeGuy Also, if need be, I can handle holding submissions from the community. It may work a bit better than dealing with third-party sharing services potentially deleting the submission under DMCA before you get a chance to see it.
At present the archive is less than 1TB, but it continues to grow. We have discussed bit torrent before, and that would only become an option if the Winworld collection were to stop growing.
If you are concerned about file hosters deleting submissions, then send me the links via PM rather than publicly posting them. In theory, Mega can't even tell what a file contains unless you have made the decryption key part of the URL public.