MrFlibble wrote:

I was thinking, maybe it's time to start archiving those ftp sites that still have the old content of DOS and early Windows era games

You're surely not the first person to think of this.

Of course, the problem is, what do you do with these backups once you've made them?

Jorpho wrote:

Of course, the problem is, what do you do with these backups once you've made them?

Do you walk into a museum and ask what they do with all of this old junk? Not the best analogy but you get the idea 😀

Jorpho wrote:

Of course, the problem is, what do you do with these backups once you've made them?

Ask these guys: http://archiveteam.org

d1stortion wrote:

Do you walk into a museum and ask what they do with all of this old junk? Not the best analogy but you get the idea 😀

Actually, a lot of museums have vast storehouses of artifacts that very rarely see the light of day simply because there is no convenient place to exhibit them.

Likewise, there are probably several hundred (if not several thousand) backups of the sites in question out there in private hands, except they're all in offline storage or sitting in a CD binder somewhere. And so people conclude that no one could possibly have backed up these sites before and that backing them up is a really great idea.

And then the sites really do go down one day and there's a sudden panic of "ZOMG doesn't anyone have a backup!?" And suddenly the people who have such a backup are nowhere to be found, or can't find their backups in their giant old CD binders, or can't find a convenient way to put it online, or find a convenient way to put it online but don't advertise it sufficiently. And in the end it turns out no one particularly cares anyway because most of the content that people were concerned about was available from other sources for a long time.

Jorpho wrote:

Of course, the problem is, what do you do with these backups once you've made them?

Make backups of backups. No, seriously. And of course it would be nice if there was someone to host mirrors of said ftps.

In fact, archive.org has this kind of archiving actually, within the FTP Site Boneyard project, but it's a little bit inconvenient to use as there's no way to browse individual files.

I've made a habit of selectively storing copies of old games and applications and mirroring some archives if space permits. The problem is always the cost of storage and the gamble of how long such information will remain available.

I've got some new drives on the way I nabbed from an early Black Friday deal, replacing all of my 1.5TB backup drives to 3TB, so I'm planning to have a fair amount of free space shortly. I'll definitely try to mirror all of the sites you listed if I can. I doubt there are very many people doing so for old software like this.

I'd love to mirror the betaarchive ftp but, since it should remain available for some time, I'm hoping that disk storage will advance enough so that I can fit the whole thing on a single disk before I attempt this. I think it's about 5TB right now.

Kahenraz wrote:

I've got some new drives on the way I nabbed from an early Black Friday deal, replacing all of my 1.5TB backup drives to 3TB, so I'm planning to have a fair amount of free space shortly. I'll definitely try to mirror all of the sites you listed if I can.

That would be wonderful, thanks!

If there were only someone to grab all the goodies from mbnet.fi... they seem to have the more obscure stuff. The non-mainstream (NOT FUCKING MORAFF, SOLEAU, EPIC OR APOGEE OR ANYONE ELSE THAT BEGINS THEIR ZIP WITH A SYMBOL OR A NUMBER AND BRAGS ABOUT THEIR (PROBABLY PROGRAMMER) ART HAVING 256 COLORS WITH A BIG FAT OVERHYPED FILE_ID.DIZ FILE) shareware and freeware (especially the freeware) of the mid-to-late 90's aren't well archived at all.

I have the whole uwp-uml/ gamers.org archive backed up on a DVD somewhere...

leileilol wrote:

If there were only someone to grab all the goodies from mbnet.fi... they seem to have the more obscure stuff.

I've heard about the extent of their collection (and IIRC at some point - around 2010 I guess - one could even browse it without having an account, albeit not download anything; I think DOSGuy had a password, but not sure anymore).

leileilol wrote:

I have the whole uwp-uml/ gamers.org archive backed up on a DVD somewhere...

That's quite reassuring to know there's a backup. I wonder why the site went down in the first place, especially since it had never occurred to me to look up who was running it.

I remember that around 2010 again GameFront used to have all the contents of MicroProse's FTP, but then all the files except patches inexplicably disappeared. Me and Swizzle of Demu.org managed to download some of that stuff back then, but not everything. I wonder if someone at GameFront actually has the MPS archive or they just threw it away (?). Also GameFront downloads generally don't work for me for a year or maybe more already, the site just returns a "page not found" error every time I try to download something.

Apparently the HTTP part of gamers.org is preserved by the Wayback Machine:
http://www.gamers.org/pub/

I got my new hard drives in the mail today. It will probably take me a few days to back everything up before I can start working on these.

ftp.gamers.org is back online.

Thank you for the listing, I'll go through the list and get some of the stuff interesting for me, I already have most of them already in my archive.

ftp://ftp.fsn.hu/pub/OpenDOS (7.02, 7.03; offline, use http://ftp.uni-bayreuth.de/pc/caldera/ instead)

http://cd.textfiles.com/ is also a treasure trove for old DOS stuff.

long gone already are ftp.cdrom.com and the cnet ftp

Kahenraz wrote:

I've made a habit of selectively storing copies of old games and applications and mirroring some archives if space permits. The problem is always the cost of storage and the gamble of how long such information will remain available.

Since old games have typically small files, I keep a habit of archiving my games on my Yahoo mail - sending email to myself with the game files as attachment. That goes with manuals too.

I maintain a file server at home which currently has 25TB out of 28TB used.

Looked into upgrading to 32GB from 16GB of memory yesterday but it looks like the X38 chipset tops out at 16gb (Bought this mobo back in 2007).

Currently I'm limited to 9 drives so unless I replace the 4TB ones with 5/6TB I''m out of expansion and I'm wondering how well FreeNAS would deal with the added storage with only 16GB of memory......

So likely towards the end of this year or next I'll be looking into a 24bay enclosure with 4TB drives.

Of course none of this is publicly available but there have been numerous times where I've helped someone beause I had it squirreled away. I've thought about copying to the internets but with this amount of data it's a PITA to manage just locally and the fear of losing the info due to crappy IT (I'm in IT so I know how it goes) always is in the forefront of my mind.

DosFreak wrote:

I maintain a file server at home which currently has 25TB out of 28TB used.

Do you have backup/contingency plan?

I have to admit I don't have backup for my entire collection, but I try to backup some of the rare/important ones to the internet, like the CH Speedkeys utility I received from Bob Church (put in Vogons Drivers and my Mega New Zealand account), and certain hard-to-find game manuals like ATAC or Flight of the Intruder.

All data is offsited (at work) using multiple dual bay synology NAS with 1 NAS synced per week. Unfortunately I'm running out on space on those so I hope the 5TB hard drives come out this year. ( I can't even do snapshots due to how low on space I am 🙁 )

I've been looking at LTO5/6 as an alternative backup but I like the portability of the NAS. If I go somewhere I can just dump it in a bag and it's readily accessible.

Downside to NAS is no NAS currently supports ZFS so although my data is highly reliable on my server (checksummed filesystem, ecc memory)...on the NAS not so much (no ecc, ext4 filesystem) and of course the issue with tape is you could have corruption and never know it whereas I'm much more confident of my NAS telling me (at least more than tape). I long ago got away from doing backups via USB after dealing with compatibility and corruption issues....never again!

I like this discussion -- what is the current state of backups? Is there a plan/committee in place to backup all of these files and perhaps host them on a single FTP site that would never die/go under, maybe affiliated with members of VOGONS? I've been looking into hosting plans and found some that are rather cheap with *unlimited* space.