this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
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    Does lemmy have any communities dedicated to archiving/hoarding data?

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    I also recommend downloading β€œFlashpoint archive” to have flash games and animations to stay entertained.

    There is a 4gb version and a 2.3TB version.

    [–] zephiriz@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 hour ago

    Years ago I bought a physical encyclopedia. I remember having one as a kid and using it for school reports. Also just looking through it can be cool. Learning about something you never knew existed is just a unique experience and doing it through a physical book just deepens the whole experience.

    I also learned the practice of printing a physical encyclopedia is going out of fashion. I think there is only one company the still prints a yearly encyclopedia and it's not Encyclopedia Britannica of all things. Might have change since I bought my copy but go give some physical media some love if you can.

    There should be.

    [–] hayvan@feddit.nl 7 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

    Is there a context to this or just random thought?

    [–] WoodScientist@lemmy.world 12 points 2 hours ago

    You can ignore politics, but politics will not ignore you.

    I bought a 14tb drive just for backups of all my other drives... and I got a shitload more space.

    [–] Maroon@lemmy.world 23 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

    I thought the whole point of torrenting was to decentralise distribution. I use torrents to get my distros.

    In my own little bubble, I thought that's how most people got their distro.

    [–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (3 children)

    What happens when they just cut the underwater cables? Torrent over carrier pigeon for a linux distro would take ages

    [–] DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 hour ago

    A good way to see what the future of places like the U.S are is to look at places like North Korea, where they do exactly this, move files around on flash media to avoid the state censors.

    [–] hayvan@feddit.nl 10 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

    Sneakernet to the rescue. Some of you are too young to know about walking around with boxes full of disks.

    [–] oppy1984@lemdro.id 1 points 16 minutes ago

    It was trading CD-R's during my high school days.... good times. Napster was just starting to take off by the time we had a CD-R trading network set up, Napster just increased the amount of CD's that got passed around.

    Tiny jump drives on pigeons is low key excellent imo

    [–] drq@mastodon.ml 7 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

    @Maroon I thought torrent technology to be a godsend for package managers.

    Why none of them use it?

    I mean, damn.

    @AnimalsDream

    [–] gerowen@lemmy.world 28 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

    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.

    [–] trashboat@midwest.social 2 points 2 hours ago

    I rarely get bounced by Anubis, but oddly enough it has happened to me a couple times in FF, I suspect it’s the fingerprinting resistance settings that cause this to happen? Hasn’t happened in a while though

    [–] pyrflie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 59 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

    Welcome to datahoarders.

    We've been here for decades.

    Also follow 3-2-1 people. 3 Backups, 2 storage mediums, 1 offsite.

    [–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

    "backups"? Pray tell, fine sir and or madam, what is that?

    [–] wurstgulasch3000@feddit.org 4 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

    You know there's only two kind of people, those who do backups and those that haven't lost a hard drive/data before. Also: raid is no backup

    [–] utopiah@lemmy.world 26 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

    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.

    [–] LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

    Watch out for flash data corruption. Lots of cheap flash (USB sticks, SD cards, SSDs) lose data after just a few years of offline storage. Something something quantum tunnel bullshit, iirc.

    So either look for media that guarantee long cold storage retention (lots of businesses need to keep shit for 10 years for tax reasons), or occasionally plug it in and let do the housekeeping.

    [–] DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 hour ago

    User older flash tech can be useful here. You might not always need the highest density storage if you want to maintain files for a long time. Getting stuff built in a much larger process node makes for a much more stable form of storage.

    [–] utopiah@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

    Thanks but even though it's on a plugged HDD I don't even care for any of that data. What I mean is that none of that data is sensitive. It might be useful, potentially, but it's not unique. What I mean is that if somehow my .zim file for Wikipedia was corrupted I could download it again from https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng&category=wikipedia or elsewhere in ~30min (just checked).

    What I'm trying to highlight here is more the process than the actual outcome.

    TL;DR: yes, if one is actually serious about just getting and storing, they should verify periodically if the data is indeed fine. What I do want to highlight though is to first know how to do it at all. Anyway, you are right that for a proper solution on the long run one must understand how (cold) storage actually works. My heuristic is that it's like can food (which I don't use much), it might last a while, but not forever.

    [–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

    I thought the point of backing stuff up was to have things in case just downloading it again isn't a viable option?

    [–] utopiah@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

    It can be but not to me. To me the point is to test what's actually feasible and usable. It can be Wikipedia on my HDD but it could also be SO on a microSD or a RPi ... or it could be something totally different on another piece of hardware with another piece of storage. It will depend on the context.

    So again, sure, having the data itself feels nice but in practice I never really needed it. If tomorrow my HDD would die I would shrug. If tomorrow Kiwix library wouldn't work anymore, I'd be disappointed but I could rely on .zim file elsewhere, e.g. on torrent trackers.

    IMHO the point isn't files, the point is usable knowledge.

    Edit : to be clear this isn't philosophy, you can see exactly what I mean and even HOW I do it (and even when) with the edits of my public wiki or my git repositories.

    [–] b000rg@midwest.social 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

    It's more that flash NAND uses a small electric charge to keep the NAND gates in the correct configuration. Over time, that charge dissipates. If you power the storage device every once in a while, you minimize these chances.

    Here's a video explaining why it happens to Wii U's after being powered off for a while. https://youtu.be/JHME4zLs6Qs

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    [–] Pringles@sopuli.xyz 4 points 7 hours ago

    I still have a copy of wikipedia from 2021 somewhere on my NAS.

    [–] daggermoon@lemmy.world 5 points 9 hours ago

    Might store it on an external HDD. I got plenty.

    [–] West_of_West@piefed.social 17 points 13 hours ago (4 children)

    Last year I bought a hard copy of my favorite webcomic in case the website goes down.

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