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Comment by mkl | Hacker News Reader

Only the existing bits. New publications wouldn't be included, so eventually the archive would become less relevant and stop being shared. There's significant cost for the required storage (currently 77TB according to andyxor's comment).

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108T 104T 3,9T 97% /home/scihub

77TB (or 104 TB) sounds expensive, but many people reading this could buy that kind of storage with just one month's salary. (SeaGate IronWolf Pro 16 TB, currently $521 on Amazon)

77 / 16 = 5.5 (6 disks) at $521 per disk turns into $3126. Seems only 11 countries in the world has a higher salary than $3126[1], and probably people wouldn't buy something like that with their entire monthly salary, so at least $5000 a month is required to be able to just dispose $3126 for some drives. That leaves 5 countries with a average salary higher than $5000.

Granted, the source might not be the best, nor using average salaries as a signal either, but to say that many people can spend something like that on a whim seems ignorant at best.

- [1] https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php

They said "many people reading this" and HN's biggest audience is US tech workers. It wouldn't be ignorant to say that many US tech workers can afford that.

The table doesn't list the same as the map. For instance Norway and Sweden is included in the map, but not in the table. And I don't think the average reader here should be compared to the average income around the world. Rather a top single digit percent.

This is why broad averages aren't always the most useful statistic. The number of complete mirrors required to make the data trove fairly robust is much lower than the number of people in the world, and the prior commentor's qualifier was "people reading this", which is likely a biased sample and includes many people working in technology in the richest countries in the world. It's unlikely that said population's income is clustered around overall national averages, and only a relatively small number of outliers are required to set up adequate mirroring.

you could do it for about $2300 by shucking external hard drives. I picked up a couple 10TB WD drives last year for $210 each for my NAS.

Off topic but I didn’t realize you could save that much! Why are externals less expensive?

There's a bit on the r/DataHoarder subreddit about it[0]. They say it comes down to a shorter warranty, more demand and "Binning of performance parts".

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/wiki/hardware#wiki_shuc...

You can get amazing deals on storage at different points in the year. I have a Seagate 16TB external hard disk that I bought during Black Friday sales of 2020 for about $270, half of your quoted price. Currently, it is $450 new.

At the reduced cost, we'd only need 7 of those for 112TB of storage, and that's $1890 + taxes, close to $2000. Not a lot of money for a backup of humanity's knowledge.

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