PSA: Download on your hard drives, never trust online hosting.

TLDR: Download your content offline before it gets lost forever.

From now on you should never trust online hosting, I started seeing a lot of piracy sources( Streaming websites, torrent indexes,.. Etc) get shut down.

So I highly recommend for all pirates to download anything they want offline to reuse and don't trust keeping it online, sadly for me, a lot of material had been lost as there is almost no online service or piracy service has it( I am talking about material that is 5-10 years old.).

I know that this is not the first time piracy websites/hosts gets taken down but this time feels different as it became aggressive and I feel that in the next months a considerable amount of content are going to be lost.

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People also need to keep seeding torrents. That’s how we can keep stuff alive
- Everybody should look into hardlinks and cross-seeding. By today's standards, it's painless and very unlikely to ever take up your bandwith
  
  and very unlikely to ever take up your bandwith
  Are you sure about that? Not all of us have fiber, you know. For instance, I have like 175 Mbps down, but only like either 2 or 10 Mbps up. (I can't remember which. Lol.)
I'm honestly kind of surprised there aren't "torrent torrents." Just distributing a collection of torrents that might be of interest within a given category, say "top 100 movies of 2024." Once you have the list of torrents locally you are less reliant upon some website hosting them for you.
- Great idea. I was very happy to find a top 100 science fiction audiobook collection torrent many years ago
- This is one advantage Gnutella had/has over torrents. Kind of like a federated content library. Too bad low quality content and malware were such a huge problem.
I feel like this whole hobby has always existed on the verge of being deleted for whatever reason, and I am forever grateful that there are people who put this stuff up in the first place.
Still need to work out a way for me to help out.
I download to my HDD and anything truly worth of keeping gets burned to a BD-R disc for long term cold storage. HDD is more likely to fail in 10+ years than a BD-R.
- Building a NAS is a large upfront cost but it’s worth it IMO. Giant HDDs are fairly cheap now and you can use cool filesystems like Btrfs to combat bit flips from cosmic rays and the like. I’m not sure I’d trust a dye based optical media, but there are apparently some archive quality 100 year BD-R. Most have a drastically shorter lifespan, though.
  According to the Canadian Conservation Institute, which publishes a paper on media longevity, BD-R discs are expected to last between 5 and 20 years, depending on the material they are made out of. BD-RE, which is erasable Blu-ray, is estimated for 20 to 50 years while DVD-R and CD-R, which hold a lot less data, can last 50 to 100 years.
  https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pioneer-new-blu-ray-recorder-and-bdr-promise-100-years-lifespan
  
  Building a NAS is a large upfront cost but it’s worth it IMO.
  Too much of a hassle. With discs, they can be transported far easier than a NAS + drives and they can be compartmentalized and distributed to other people easier than with a NAS.
  I’m not sure I’d trust a dye based optical media, but there are apparently some archive quality 100 year BD-R.
  I wouldn't trust dye-based optical media either. The BD-R discs I use incorporate an inorganic writable layer that's rated for 100+ year storage under ideal conditions. BD-R discs are WORM (write once, read many times) so they cannot be re-written-- another massive benefit for archival purposes.
  https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pioneer-new-blu-ray-recorder-and-bdr-promise-100-years-lifespan
  The author of this article did a very poor job at researching the subject matter. There's zero mention of things like the difference between HTL vs LTH, or things like Verbatim's MABL layers. There's a good reason why one form of preferred media storage archivists use is BD-R. Let's take the 100+ year ratings with a grain of salt, and assume say... 50 years. The average hard drive can be relied on for about 10 years. You can see where I'm going with this, which is why I'm far more comfortable using BD-R discs with HTL/MABL for long term data storage instead of hard drives which would have to be replaced every 10 years or so.
  BD-R discs are expected to last between 5 and 20 years, depending on the material they are made out of. BD-RE, which is erasable Blu-ray, is estimated for 20 to 50 years while DVD-R and CD-R, which hold a lot less data, can last 50 to 100 years.
  I've seen that Canadian govt link passed around on other forums and I'd remind people of how painfully outdated that info is. Again, no mention of HTL, which is the big factor that significantly improves longevity and reliability. What I've always found really bizarre is that they single academic paper that the Canadian govt page relies on in terms of BD-R's lifespan (Iraci 2018) is hardly adequate. If you read Iraci 2018, you'll see how it... really isn't based on good data or testing practices at all. I think the problem is people see a scientific citation and (understandably) assume the info is legit, but in this case scratching the surface reveals an incredibly bad research paper written by an author who appears to have very little past/future experience in that field.
  Testing involved the exposure of samples to conditions of 80 °C and 85 % relative humidity for intervals up to 84 days
  ^ That's from Iraci 2018. Testing the reliability of a product should involve realistic conditions. I'd ask anyone who supports Iraci's paper to answer this-- in what kind of remotely plausible situation would you find yourself in where conditions are 80 °C with 85% RH? Further, do you trust a paper that purports these conditions to be suitable when testing the longevity of optical media? To me, this is like testing various panes of glass by throwing them off a high rise building. Iraci's paper is ridiculous, IMO-- and there's a good reason why it's been cited like 2 times in the last 6 years.
- I really need to get a BD-R.
  
  The whirring sound alone is worth it. Lovely memories.
To add to this, back that local hardrive up on a REMOVABLE drive, and keep it physically detached. We are all one lightning strike away from near total loss.
- or unplug the pc/nas/whatever everytime it's shut down
  
  Would a surge protector be enough? I've never owned one, but I've considered putting my PC, router and (in the future) NAS behind both a surge protector and a UPS.
- Youtube has been getting crazy with deletions! If it's not G rated it's getting tossed.
12 TB drives are pretty cheap right now.
- Just bought a bunch of $75 12TB disks from GoHardDrive's eBay storefront.
  Still running through the diagnostics, but nothing has jumped out yet, 48hrs in. Sure, they're 4 years old and have over a petabyte of lifetime writes. They also have 5 year warranties.
  
  Aren't these old and abused disks...?
- Where? 🤔
  
  Diskprices is great for comparing price per terabyte across different brands.
  
  Got an 18tb from serverpartdeals for 160 I think.
  
  I just buy all my stuff on newegg. Decent 12 TB drives are going for around $250 to $300 right now.
I started seeing a lot of piracy sources( Streaming websites, torrent indexes,.. Etc) get shut down.
Been like that for the past 30 years. Or worse, they remain active but kept as a Honeypot.
And upload content as torrents, share the torrent files/magnet links and keep seeding!
We need some sort of historical torrent indexer for lost/dead torrents, a wayback machine for magnet links that gathers/scrapes them automagically from the internet
- that's the pirate bay
Can someone explain to me why these services were on the clearnet to begin with?
- i2p and Tor are really slow + the amount of people who use them are small compared to the clearnet and also a lot of those websites have ads on their website which would not work on i2p or Tor , so it does not make any sense to host it there.
  
  I guess z-library needs to make a template on how to get a setup like theirs working. Unlimited subdomains lmao
  
  Ads work on .onion. I'd never click one, but you can show a banner no problem.
Thanks for reminding me. Yeah I need to backup my ROM library of old games. Got most of them from Vimm's lair earlier this year. They had to take down a lot of the games shortly after cause threats of law suit from Nintendo, Sega among others. It's just absurd many of the games on there are not even available legally anymore.
I've been maxxing out ram on my pi 3b OMV/docker server and was looking at getting a pi 5 to replace it. Are there any good guides for setting up that *arr stuff I see out and about?
Also open to other hardware alternatives to upgrade from a pi. I saw a lot of n100 hype but I just don't expect it to be the miracle worker some people claim it to be lol

44 comments