Hacker News Reader

Comment by ve55 | Hacker News Reader

I would go even further: Always have a local backup of anything on the Internet that is important to you, whether you made it or not, unless you know there are many other accessible versions of it for redundancy. You never know when a large company will delete it without notice.

(Is this feasible? Perhaps not, but given how cheap storage is, if this could be even semi-automated, it would easily save a lot of heartache for some at many points in their life, especially in the worst cases of things like their Google accounts being banned)

View on HN

If you archive youtube content, consider stopping by my discord server. https://discord.gg/EJvS4kf

I maintain a list of content that various members have archived, such that if anything is removed, people can direct inquiries to people who have archived that content.

It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived, and direct efforts toward at-risk channels.

(You can see the current list of user-archived content here: https://tinyurl.com/v4rpe9w)

This is great; is there any view towards rehosting this stuff on peertube or whatever? Or is it okay for now, to just know that it's sitting on someone's disk, as long as we know how to reach that someone if needed?

That sounds like a good way to get it all DMCAd

I've considered uploading to a peertube instance, but I ran into an issue where the instance seemed to have a policy prohibiting mirroring existing/live channels.

For the moment I make my archive available via Soulseek, and am open to requests!

I'm not surprised that there are policies against people reuploading other peoples content.

Not very wise of you to depend on Discord and Google Sheets instead of more open alternatives when you're organizing a group whose purpose is to literally preserve the victims of corporate censorship.

There's certainly irony there, but then they're actually getting on with stuff rather than debating tooling. Discord and sheets are also both free - anything else is going to require an investment of money and time.

That's fair. I take automatic backups of the sheet, such that if access to that is eventually lost I can republish via another method.

Discord is used for the simple reason that the current goal is to gain as much traction and participation as possible. The Rocketchat server I host, and the IRC channels I could have used would both acted as barriers of entry to a lot of possible participants.

Perhaps with time I can push for a migration to a solution I host. For the moment I'll stick with these tools, and plan for their failure as best I can.

I'd suggest matrix. It may be the closest you can currently come to something self hosted where most people with reading skills can figure out how to join.

ArchiveTeam has a larger YouTube archival effort running (on IRC, hackint/#youtube-archive) -- I think the channel list is on the order of tens of thousands. You can email me or ping me on IRC if you want to setup some coordination effort (no sense in doing duplicate work).

Correction: #youtubearchive (also, not an official ArchiveTeam effort)

This 1000%. I can't tell you how many times I click a link, find it's broken, plug it into Wayback Machine, only to find it was never indexed, or the images weren't archived, or only the homepage was indexed, etc.

Agreed. Nowadays if I found anything really interesting and not a video I'll just save the while webpage in local. Usually only the texts and pictures matter so when I reopen them the webpages still look OK.

I wonder how to trigger archive.org spiders...

>Always have a local backup of anything on the Internet that is important to you

Also would be a nice service to others to create a backup on archive.today and archive.org, and similar sites.

Seconded. My go-to for site archival is HTTRACK but there may be more modern tools that handle active content better.

Does this work on all the dumb SPAs of today?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com