Does lemmy have any communities dedicated to archiving/hoarding data?
I still have a copy of wikipedia from 2021 somewhere on my NAS.
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
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Neither are that bad honestly. I have jigdo scripts I run with every point release of Debian and have a copy of English Wikipedia on a Kiwix mirror I also host. Wikipedia is a tad over 100 GB. The source, arm64 and amd64 complete repos (DVD images) for Debian Trixie, including the network installer and a couple live boot images, are 353 GB.
Kiwix has copies of a LOT of stuff, including Wikipedia on their website. You can view their zim files with a desktop application or host your own web version. Their website is: https://kiwix.org/
If you want (or if Wikipedia is censored for you) you can also look at my mirror to see what a web hosted version looks like: https://kiwix.marcusadams.me/
Note: I use Anubis to help block scrapers. You should have no issues as a human other than you may see a little anime girl for a second on first load, but every once and a while Brave has a disagreement with her and a page won't load correctly. I've only seen it in Brave, and only rarely, but I've seen it once or twice so thought I'd mention it.
Welcome to datahoarders.
We've been here for decades.
Also follow 3-2-1 people. 3 Backups, 2 storage mediums, 1 offsite.
I heart there is Wikipedia on ipfs. Is that a good solution for Linux packages too?
Might store it on an external HDD. I got plenty.
FWIW :
fabien@debian2080ti:/media/fabien/slowdisk$ ls -lhS offline_prep/
total 341G
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 103G Jul 6 2024 wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2024-01.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 81G Apr 22 2023 gutenberg_mul_all_2023-04.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 75G Jul 7 2024 stackoverflow.com_en_all_2023-11.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 74G Mar 10 2024 planet-240304.osm.pbf
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 3.8G Oct 18 06:55 debian-13.1.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 2.6G May 7 2023 ifixit_en_all_2023-04.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 1.6G May 7 2023 developer.mozilla.org_en_all_2023-02.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 931M May 7 2023 diy.stackexchange.com_en_all_2023-03.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 808M Jun 5 2023 wikivoyage_en_all_maxi_2023-05.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 296M Apr 30 2023 raspberrypi.stackexchange.com_en_all_2022-11.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 131M May 7 2023 rapsberry_pi_docs_2023-01.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 100M May 7 2023 100r-off-the-grid_en_2022-06.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 61M May 7 2023 quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com_en_all_2022-11.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 45M May 7 2023 computergraphics.stackexchange.com_en_all_2022-11.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 37M May 7 2023 wordnet_en_all_2023-04.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 23M Jul 17 2023 kiwix-tools_linux-armv6-3.5.0-1.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 16M Oct 6 21:32 be-stib-gtfs.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 3.8M Oct 6 21:32 be-sncb-gtfs.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 2.3M May 7 2023 termux_en_all_maxi_2022-12.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 1.9M May 7 2023 kiwix-firefox_3.8.0.xpi
but if you want the easier version just get Kiwix on whatever device in front of you right now (yes, even mobile phone assuming you have the space) then get whatever content you need.
If need a bit of help I recorded TechSovereignty at home, episode 11 - Offline Wikipedia, Kiwix and checksums with a friend just 3 weeks ago.
I also wrote randomly update https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/Vademecum and coded https://git.benetou.fr/utopiah/offline-octopus but tbh KDE-Connect is much better now.
The point though is having such a repository takes minutes. If you don't have the space, buy a 512Go microSD for 50EUR then put that on, stuff it in a drawer then move on. If you want to every 3 months or whenever you feel like it, updated it.
TL;DR: takes longer to write such a meme than actually do it.
Whoa, what are all those things you have?
I kind of want that hackermans diy pc that runs on 18650 cells
On prem NAS or SAN⦠you should have built it 3 years ago.
why? what happened 3y ago?
Last year I bought a hard copy of my favorite webcomic in case the website goes down.
Which webcomic?
Girls with Slingshots, it ended over a decade ago, but I still love the characters. I realized if the author dies and stops renewing the website it could disappear. As a foundational part of my early twenties I couldn't accept that.
I'll have to check it out. Thanks for the recommendation.
Different guy but Sunstone.
we need all repos to be stored offline, and documentations to troubleshoot.
the 1st i have no idea how much space we will need. Most linux packages are prerry light, no? But there is A LOT of them...
the 2nd is easy. Heard someone say the entire of wikipedia is 200GB, should be doable. Dont forget the technical wikis too: Debian, Gentoo, Arch.
Can't remember who it was (b3ta? popbitch? penny-arcade?), but I recently saw a comment by someone who's been running a website since the turn of the millennium, and they said that fully 99% of the links they posted two decades ago were no longer valid.
To really put that into perspective, you have to remember that for most sites to get linked to from a popular site like that, meant that it was usually something of value that would have had a lot of work put into it, and that people found interesting or useful.
The official USBs of Trixie fit all 28 DVDs of AMD64 on a 256GiB USB stick
https://www.linuxcollections.com/products/debian/debianusb.htm?id=51007
You'd probably want the 512GiB with all the sources for a real backup in this scenario
Wait, isn't there an offline copy of a part of Wikipedia? The article Just by yourself a nice printer with enough ink and do it yourself ;)
For wikipedia you'll want to use Kiwix. A full backup of wikipedia is only like 100GB, and I think that includes pictures too.
Last time I updated it was closer to 120GB but if you're not sweating 100 GB then an extra 20 isn't going to bother anyone these days.
Also, thanks for reminding me that I need to check my dates and update.
EDIT: you can also easily configure a SBC like a Raspberry Pi (or any of the clones) that will boot, set the Wi-Fi to access point mode, and serve kiwix as a website that anyone (on the local AP wifi network) can connect to and query... And it'll run off a USB battery pack. I have one kicking around the house somewhere
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I stumbled across this sort of fascinating area of doomsday prepping a few weeks back.
A nice addition to that, don't just make it a USB, but a raspberry pi. So you'd have a reasonably low-powered computer you could easily take with you.
Not suggesting this one as it seems a bit expensive to me, but https://www.prepperdisk.com/products/prepper-disk-premium-over-512gb-of-survival-content?view=sl-8978CA41
at this point why not just use a phone running postmarketos?
Last I checked (3 years ago) postmarketOS drained the pinephone battery in record time :(
You'd first have to buy a phone that can run postmarketos and these are much rarer than I wish they were. Is there even anything new that can run it? Pine64 stopped making phones and said they'll make a new one when they can make it RISC-V.
Fairphone maybe I guess. 4 is listed as a supported device, but someone has gotten it working on 6 too.
Cause if ya wanna go overboard like I did, 1TB of NVME storage, can add with SD Card if necessary. 16GB RAM. Very little learning curve for my part as I use SBCs often. Plus almost every Docker container and program I want works on RPi without any hassle.
There's also more robust guides and community for RPi.
Just my thoughts.
Just built one of these myself. I went NVME M.2 instead of SD Card to avoid data corruption. I know SD Cards are fine if you don't write to them a lot but if you wanna update or add your own stuff, scares me. Plus NVME is just so much faster.
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I downloaded wikipedia a month or two ago, I recommend it.
How big is Wikipedia?
If you don't care about edit history, and only care about English, there are zim files w/ images for <150 GiB
Yeah not gonna lie, i think i heard someone in a youtube video a while back talk about how the entirety of wikipedia takes up like 200 gigs or something like that, and it got me seriously considering to actually make that offline backup. Shit is scary when countries like the uk are basically blocking you from having easy access to knowledge.
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The English Language Wikipedia probably wouldn't be hard, or Debian Stable.
All of Debian's packages might be a tad more expensive, though.
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Curious about the mindset of the one (so far) person who has downvoted this post. What is there to dislike about archiving Linux and Wikipedia? π€
They are probably using a phone app which allows you to swipe sideways to downvote and also using screen gestures to 'go back'. I've accidentally downvoted things this way.
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