Keeping personal copies of online resources

[jhd]

OK, so the topic title is a bit awkwardly worded, but the recent take-down of the online back issues of Nintendo Power has inspired this question:

Does anyone else keep (personal, off-line) copies of online resources?

 

I regularly download copies of video game magazines, individual web pages, videos, etc. for my own personal use. I have no intention of ever re-posting or sharing this content, but I like to have a copy handy in case the original disappears or otherwise becomes unavailable for whatever reason. Storage space, especially with a flash drive, is cheap.

 

While this is not a comprehensive list of every video game and computer magazine that is available online somewhere, it includes a very broad range of titles:

http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~ab443/mags.html

[godslabrat]

SOMEWHERE, and it would literally take me months to find them, I have copies of the original MST3k website from the Sci-Fi channel, ca. 1999, and Nintendo.com's official list of NES games, from about the same time period. Mostly because I knew that one day they'd be hard to find in that format. Turns out, I was right. How useful that foresight was remains to be seen.

[+Random Terrain]

Some of those are also at archive.org. I hope those don't get yanked.

 

As far as I know, I have copies of any North American Atari 2600 related magazines that I've seen online, including The Video Game Update newsletter.

[VectorGamer]

I should've downloaded all the episodes of Starcade that G4 had on YouTube. Now they're gone.

[4Ks]

I used to have the entire Flame Warriors and Book of Gord sites saved as .gifs, but the laptop it was on kicked the bucket so I don't have the files anymore. I should probably get around to re-saving them before they go offline.

 

Back in my pre-broadband days I would also download Youtube videos to watch later because my connection wasn't fast enough to stream. Not an issue for me anymore, thankfully.

[BassGuitari]

In the last few weeks I've started downloading select issues of EGM and stuff like The Atarian on Retromags.com. I thought Nintendo Power was still up there, but I didn't really look.

[Flojomojo]

A healthier approach might be to think of time and the web as a river, and every time you step in, you get something new.

 

I know of at least one person online who is a Twitter competionist, meaning he reads his whole stream every day, no dipping in and out and going with the flow.

I try to save cool stuff to read. It's crazy-making to try and grab everything, though -- especially when I don't get around to reading a lot of the stuff I'm hoarding. I subscribe to the Pro versions of Feedly and Pocket so I've got a massive archive of "interesting things" which are only interesting to me. I toss PDF "prints" of good stuff into Google Reader for reading and Dropbox for saving.

 

If you've followed the profoundly stupid but entertaining Coleco Chameleon thread, you've noticed that some good stuff, like Facebook posts, just *poof* vanish from the ether. You can request a Wayback Machine snapshot of the top level of a site (i.e. no attachments will be saved) by following these instructions

 

Can I add pages to the Wayback Machine?

On https://archive.org/web you can use the "Save Page Now" feature to save a specific page one time. This does not currently add the URL to any future crawls nor does it save more than that one page. It does not save multiple pages, directories or entire sites.

 

I'm trying to live more in the moment, because backing up all that garbage can't be healthy.

 

Also, scans of old Nintendo Power magazines are still out there and you needn't feel like you're the only one holding on to them.

[Keatah]

In comparison to a personal archive, anything on the internet is temporary. It can go away at any time for any reason.

[Keatah]

A healthier approach might be to think of time and the web as a river, and every time you step in, you get something new.

I try to save cool stuff to read. It's crazy-making to try and grab everything, though -- especially when I don't get around to reading a lot of the stuff I'm hoarding. I subscribe to the Pro versions of Feedly and Pocket so I've got a massive archive of "interesting things" which are only interesting to me. I toss PDF "prints" of good stuff into Google Reader for reading and Dropbox for saving.

 

I'm trying to live more in the moment, because backing up all that garbage can't be healthy.

 

It's not that bad if you archive and build over time. And don't spend inordinate amounts of time curating it, or trying to read all of it.

 

[Flojomojo]

Then what's the point of having it?

[jhd]

I see my online collection as an extension of my in-print library (ca. 5,000 volumes, and steadily growing).

 

There are some titles that I will read cover-to-cover, but most of the books are used just for reference. Personal copies of online resources are really no different.

 

For example, I am very interested in architecture and heritage buildings. I own several dozen books on this topic, both generally and relating to specific communities. I will visit a city somewhere and take pictures of old buildings there. I then use my reference books to research the history of those particular buildings that I have photographed. (Which photos and commentary are then added to my website, for others to preserve off-line...) I have no interest in reading every entry in a detailed guide to the buildings of East Podunk, but I will carefully read the sections about some of them.

 

Similarly, some sections of old video game magazines are largely irrelevant today (e.g. contests, previews of forthcoming games, industry news, rumours, and gossip), but the reviews are still interesting, and the strategy guides are very useful. I do not read these magazines cover-to-cover, but I will certainly read those articles that are still relevant and interesting. (For the record, I will buy hard copies of old video game magazines when I can find them; alas this is very rare.)

 

P.S. I have just discovered that a website that hosted the back-file of a Canadian history journal has recently removed that content. It is now no longer available online. Happily, I saved copies of all of the possibly relevant articles when I first discovered that site a few years ago...

[Keatah]

Then what's the point of having it?

Never know where a future research project or deep dive might take you.

[fiddlepaddle]

Virtual hoarding will soon get it's own TV show?

[Video]

In the late 90's when I first got into jaguar there was a site called jaguar community united. I printed the site and every new thing that came out till it was taken down. Still got several hundred pages around here somewhere.

 

I also used to copy video in the days before youtube. Got some Joe cartoon and shockwave stuff like radiskull and devil doll. To bad that never got finished. I still listen to it.

Edited August 11, 2016 by Video

[AguyinarRPG]

I have a huge document dedicated to this for research purposes, just regarding game mags. There's a lot of sites I found by pure chance. If anyone wants to see it, I can put it up on a pastebin.

Edited August 13, 2016 by AguyinarRPG

[omegadot]

If I find something interesting I usually make a local copy and some of that heads off to its own online backup. Since my various hobbies have been going for decades I've been very thankful for that habit as it's 0 effort for me to bop into one of my data drives and pull something up if I so fancy. At this point I have a pretty sizeable collection of print, audio, and game files. Sometimes tracking things down again online is a pain and the quality may vary. I don't worry about my digital collections, so it doesn't add to my mental load at any given time. If it somehow morphed into an obsession I may bail on it.

[+MrBlackCat]

A healthier approach might be to think of time and the web as a river, and every time you step in, you get something new.

 

<snip>

I'm trying to live more in the moment, because backing up all that garbage can't be healthy.

 

Also, scans of old Nintendo Power magazines are still out there and you needn't feel like you're the only one holding on to them.

Regardless of how much I archive, I step into that digital river as often as possible. I don't consider my archives as replacement, but just a little insurance in case of loss or removal.

 

Maybe I am missing some context here, but relating "unhealthy" to archiving isn't how I view it. I am certain that anything can be done to unhealthy extremes or in unhealthy ways. I store around 65TB of archived material and will be migrating another 88TB server for personal storage next year. I also have most every email I have received since 1985. I enjoy occasionally reminiscing as well as just general research, time line verification etc.

The point being that I suffer no stress or unhealthy side effects from this.

 

This makes me think of all those YouTube videos I see converted from previous forms of media storage (VCR etc) that were old television commercials of video games from so long ago. I love that stuff.

 

Because of the nature of Digital Data, I see archiving as much as is reasonable with as many sources as is reasonable, a positive practice. SAVE IT!

 

MrBlackCat

[Flojomojo]

88TB! What kind of equipment do you run? I don't think I'd even want to pay that electric bill, to say nothing of the disc and tape resources (because if its worth storing, it's worth backing up).

[Keatah]

If I find something interesting I usually make a local copy and some of that heads off to its own online backup. Since my various hobbies have been going for decades I've been very thankful for that habit as it's 0 effort for me to bop into one of my data drives and pull something up if I so fancy. At this point I have a pretty sizeable collection of print, audio, and game files. Sometimes tracking things down again online is a pain and the quality may vary. I don't worry about my digital collections, so it doesn't add to my mental load at any given time. If it somehow morphed into an obsession I may bail on it.

 

Amassing and curating a digital collection over the years is pretty much stress free. The mental load is non-existent. You can work on it at any time, any place. And like pointed out, safekeeping and backups are really no big deal. It takes me just 10 or 15 minutes every couple of months to conduct one.

[omegadot]

 

Amassing and curating a digital collection over the years is pretty much stress free. The mental load is non-existent. You can work on it at any time, any place. And like pointed out, safekeeping and backups are really no big deal. It takes me just 10 or 15 minutes every couple of months to conduct one.

It's so easy I assumed it was normal to slowly build up a large archive over the years.

[Keatah]

Many people are averse to curating a local homegrown digital collection because of "online" and the fact it can't be done on a smartphone. Learning cut'n'paste operations on the PC file system is simply too complex.

 

There seems to be some sort of mis-guided lure about storing things online. People sometimes think that online storage is safer than local storage. But that's simply not true. These cloud services change just like the weather, they come and they go. Why else would it be called cloud computing?

Edited August 14, 2016 by Keatah

[Newsdee]

With today's gigabytes of storage, a digital collection should be trivial to backup on a Bluray for instance.

 

But even with that you still have to worry about making sure your backups are readable, and organizing the whole thing so you know where things are.

[Keatah]

I try not to break apart media. 1:1 copying is easiest. This means a 2TB HDD gets mirrored to another 2TB HDD. All it takes is for you to start the copy process. No keeping track of nothing.

 

The first time is the longest, subsequent backups can be 5-minute filesyncs.

[Keatah]

..These cloud services change just like the weather, they come and they go. Why else would it be called cloud computing?

 

I want to add that while a cloud service may not go out of business, it will evolve and change. It may even change to the point where you are forced to upgrade your OS and browser to access it. And this could potentially mean having to buy a new computer too depending what you already have.

 

It is nice to see that data stored locally on a 15 year old computer is still accessible with the same familiar interface. And in context of digital photography all graphics formats and sizes imaginable are also supported. From stuff on the Apple II through the latest and greatest DSLR.

 

Had the been stored on the first versions of Google's Picasso or DropBox, when the services were new, you'd have to have upgraded your rig to present day standards to get your data back.

[jhd]

I used to use a free online service for photo sharing (not so much for storage). It still exists, but it has become so very slow that it is no longer usable. I still have content hosted there, but mainly because it is now too difficult and cumbersome to get online to do anything with it.