Re: [NTLK] Museum torrent requests -- What's the point?

On 5/11/2007 8:45 PM, Matt Howe wrote:
> I'm with William on this one. I have seen Newton sites, that I have book marked, disappear into 404 and server not found land. And I think, "Man I wish I had saved a copy of that." Particularly knowledge. I am thinking of taking a copy of the Emate hinge repair and other tech sites just in case the owners of those sites get into iPhones or PepperPads. It happens, people change and move on. I can even see my self moving to a different platform some day and all that I've archived will need to be taken over by someone else. The Newton Museum archive came about because the owner was gracious enough to make copies before he left the Newton world. So my take is that I don't need to own a copy of everything. I am just acting as another off-site back up. Although I am forever going through my repository looking for gems I missed before. Recently I had a need for time management software that I never needed before and am now using Iambic's Time Reporter. And just this week I discov
ere
> d Back Drop Builder. Both are pieces of software no longer supported or offered by the original source. So if you need something, by all means, search and support UNNA. But if you can't find it, post a message to the board and we that have off-site repositories will check our stash.
>
> Matt (Ducky) Howe

Exactly. We have to support each other and the bit torrent allows
everyone to easily get a copy of a large chunk of something. This is a
big advantage if the original source goes poof. Yes while UNNA is still
running (and big thank you to Morgan for this) it make sense to have a
copy on hand. Your net connection may be down, UNNA may be down for for
maintenance or such, and you NEED something right then. Granted this is
not as likely but as Matt said, we come across great gems of software
that has fallen through the cracks (either in our own mind or everyone
else's as well). Yes we may never be able to use it all, but that is
not the point either. You walk into a HUGE library, you will never be
able to read EVERY book in there, does that mean you shouldn't go in?
No of course not! You still find gems of knowledge.

Think of it this way. Libraries have been burned in the past, think of
all the knowledge that was lost. And think if people had the ability to
have a copy of it themselves? It would not have been lost and would
have been restored in a short order. Backups always make sense. If it
took huge amounts of physical space (say store all of UNNA on 3.5 floppy
disks) it would be very impractical to do this kind of archiving. But
since it IS practical and efficient why shouldn't we? Again it always
makes sense to have backups where possible.

-Dan

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