Reposted from c/politics since it violated their rule about needing to have a link:
Now that the fascists have taken over, what books, academic studies, and pieces of knowledge should take priority in personal/private archival? I’m thinking about what happened in Nazi Germany, especially with the burning of the Institute for Sexual Science(Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) and what was lost completely in the burnings.
Some of us should consider saving stuff digitally or physically. Redundancies will help preserve stuff.
If you’d like to support archival in general, consider donating to https://archive.org/ . They regularly archive books and media that can be potentially banned. It doesn’t hurt to download parts of the archive on your machine if you want to be extra sure, but keep in mind the internet archive is massive with petabytes of data.
Archive is on American soil. They got sued for lending ebooks during the pandemic and lost, so they are not a safe bet. Archive elsewhere. Anywhere else.
They really should relocate to Europe.
How, exactly?
They should sure, who’s coughing up the tens of millions of dollars that might cost?
If they don’t have the resources to do it, they can’t.
Distributed filesystems that self hosters can support may be the future for resilient data, but we’re not really there yet in a scalable way.
Get a server in Romania for example, built up the necessary system and then either take the drives on a plane or transmit the data by internet.
The problem isn’t the money, they would pay less in Eastern European countries. The problem is the time it takes to transmit the data.
It would be best to load the entire NAS farm piece by piece into a plane and fly it there.
A Charter Plane and some trucks aren’t that expansive, and when you keep most of the hardware you don’t need to pay for massive amounts of new hardware.
The problem is that its time consuming and that the Archive will be offline for at least half a year. For doing that.
If they wanna do it really smart they keep some smaller servers all around the world and don’t do it from one country alone.
Depebding on the country, Europe has significantly worse copyright law than the US, to the extent that archiving a web page is illegal.
Fun fact:
In Germany you have to pay a special tax for anything that could be used to violate copyright. It ranges from 0.10€ for USB sticks to 90€ for faster printers to 14,000,000€ for opening up a public library - all going to a bunch of publisher organizations.
What the fuck are you talking about?
The shit show Germany has is well aware to me but also grants you the right to download whatever you want as long as you don’t distribute it.
And an archive would be doing exactly that: Distributing copyrighted materials.
Moving to Europe is not necessarily a great idea depending on the country they choose. US copyright law is comparatively lenient to some European countries, who can be said to be (much more) controlled by publishers when it comes to copyright.
Why can’t humanity seem to learn that storing all of our knowledge and cultural artifacts in just one place with no backup is a BAD IDEA? Don’t let the library of Alexandria burn again!
I’m pretty sure that they do but this is a problem of and resources, which they are strapped for
That’s why people should torrent and seed lots of its data!
Shit, now I’m doubly worried about Archive staying online.
Somebody needs to fix IPFS so we can archive all that shit and share in hosting a chunk.