I’m working on an archive system for my site and think it would be really cool to have a community-based archival where people keep backups of each-others sites so that when sites go down someone can keep an archive up.
It’s based on Alex Schroeder’s proposal Dead Archivist Society.
I explain my thinking more in a blog post, and you can download my archive from my site.
What do you think?
I think this is an interesting idea, especially with the stress of imagining if archive.org would shut down… i’m not sure i see much reason to archive my own site at this moment, but it is definitely something i will consider (because after all - why not?)
This is why the next version of my site will provide an updated UNIX tape archive of my site whenever I build it and upload. I don’t expect anybody to grab a copy, but the option is there for those who want to mirror, archive, or just read offline.
This is an interesting idea! I’ve been periodically trying to archive things on the Internet Archive, but would love to be more deliberate about it…
FYI, your link in the blog post to the archive page goes to a 404 page due to an extraneous s.
I hadn’t heard of the tar file format before! What made you choose it rather than a newer archive/compression methods?
I’m used to UNIX; I’ve been using it since 1996. The Internet is a UNIX application, therefore I think it makes sense to use standard UNIX tools. Every UNIX-like system can handle .tar files compressed with XZ (.tar.xz). Windows can handle that format too, if you install 7zip. But newer compression methods might not be as well-supported on UNIX.
Makes sense! (Also very cool that something originally designed for tapes is still in use~)
The handy thing about tar is that it not only preserves the directory structure, but file permissions. Of course, that part doesn’t really translate when extracting a tarball onto a Windows machine, but that’s a failing on the part of Microsoft, IMO.
Thanks, fixed!
If anyone is interested in doing this with their site now or in the future my inbox is open.
I’ll look out for it.
scratch that I’ve already found it :)
archives made me somewhat uncomfortable.
it is a given someone will eventually archive my stuff for a whatever reason, but i may want my stuff gone entirely, eventually. i should be be allowed to fully disappear.
while archive.org will remove you stuff on request, the majority of other archives refuse. removal refusal is imo not ethical but it is what it is