You (yes, you) can now download an archive of this site using torrent and if you make an archive too, I want to download it. Then maybe if this site goes down, my words will live on.
I was inspired by Alex Schroeder’s idea for a Dead Archivists Society (or Long Web Society), an organisation for preserving personal websites for after the author is dead, or less morbidly, they have abandoned a site - running a website isn’t free after all. This site was also offline for a while last year for technical reasons.
The Internet Archive is the obvious already existing answer to this problem and they are a great organisation that I completely support. However their web-scraping style of archiving sometimes creates a patchwork of of pages with different ages. More importantly it is a very centralised organisation and I don’t like putting all my eggs in one basket.
For many sites, such as Alex’s own, making an small archive is technically complicated, one of the reasons that the society has stalled. However my site is already quite small, with few images, an intentional decision that allows me to host this on a old Raspberry Pi. I decided to go ahead and make an archive.
I use tar and xz to make the archive in the .tar.xz format. This creates a small (15MiB) file that can be decompressed on all major desktop operating systems (xz supports Linux, Windows and MacOS). I then make a torrent file with a web source that can be used to download the archive. The bash script can be read on my git repo and you are welcome to copy it for your own site.
I’m excluding /presentations - a slightly irrelevant directory full of high-quality images embedded in PDFs - from the archive for now, until I can deal with them. My plan is to apply lossy compression (probably with ghostscript) before the lossless xz compression. I could do this to some of the images as well although I would need to be careful not to touch the pixel art.
Another improvement might be adding a tracker (or lots) to the torrent.
Let’s do this thing then
All this isn’t much use if nobody else downloads it. My first archive is available now on the archives page. Download it and you officially become part of the Provisional Archive Club, until the Dead Archivist Society/Long Web Society becomes a thing.
Please email me if you have downloaded my archive or you have an archive of your own! Hopefully we can build a bit of a community around this. And Alex if you are reading this (you probably will because I’m emailing it to you) thanks for inspiring me to do this.
I would also appreciate input on my archive creation methods which I suspect could be improved.