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Comment by HCIdivision17 | Hacker News Reader

I'll include the obligatory donation link below for what is effectively an internet utility. [0]

Also, take a look at downloading a copy of Wikipedia! You can get a full download with images for around 100GB (last I checked, which was about two years ago). It's great for if you ever think you'll need some technical info while away from live internet. I keep a copy on a hard drive that boots into linux, just in case (maybe I'll be on site with a customer and need some engineering notes - BAM taken care of!)

[0] https://archive.org/donate/

EDIT: I used XOWA, and I do not keep the wiki up to date, really. Note that the entire wiki history is huge, but a reasonably current snapshot is manageable (~100GB or so).

[~] http://xowa.org/home/wiki/Help/Download_XOWA.html

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Actually I think 100G is not that much, if you consider what you get. Furthermore some time ago I estimated that you could store the entire world's tiles (raster data in 10m resolution) and OSM data on a SSD (<500G).

If you think about it, that might be a game changer. Maybe it might make sense to ship e.g. smart phones with wikipedia, OSM and satellite photo (e.g. Sentinel-2 is free data) on disk.

Granted, 10m resolution is not the state-of-the-art in aerial imagery - which is around ~0.1m (this means 10^4 times more data) - but it is reasonable to detect buildings and combined with OSM's vector data you have practically Google Maps in your pocket.

> If you think about it, that might be a game changer. Maybe it might make sense to ship e.g. smart phones with wikipedia, OSM and satellite photo (e.g. Sentinel-2 is free data) on disk.

I don't think this is a sensible use of local phone storage, but I do think you'll see a lot more P2P edge cache nodes if/when IPFS takes off (OSM tiles are already served on the IPFS network).

It would be a simple matter of picking a VPS provider or hardware colo provider near expected heavy use, launching IPFS, and having it pin the relevant content locally.

How is caching handled for those tiles in IPFS? At OSM.org they get rerendered when the underlying data changes.

https://github.com/ipfs/faq/issues/16

If we're considering just the availability, Google Maps has an option to cache a region for offline use, which works spectacularly good - given that you get your antenna on a good signal every once in a while.

I mostly use this because limited data plan, makes it use a lot less data if you already downloaded the area you are currently in before hand while you were still on wifi.

Thank you for posting the donation link. I have donated in the past and always think about donating when the Internet Archive is mentioned.

I just set up a monthly donation amount, and I encourage you to do the same if you believe in the Internet Archive's mission!

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