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Thanks for this! A couple years ago I was having trouble falling asleep at night. I found a series of music mixes that helped me drift off, and they were worki

Thanks for this! A couple years ago I was having trouble falling asleep at night. I found a series of music mixes that helped me drift off, and they were working well until one day the creator decided to scrub every trace of themselves from the internet and disappear. I generally believe that people should be able to delete what they put online, but ever since then I've maintained my own personal archive of things I wouldn't want to lose access to forever. I use HTTrack for backing up static sites, youtube-dl for YouTube, SoundCloud, and the like, and now I'll be using this for repos on GitHub. Any more good archiving tools?

userbinator 11y ago
Not really a "tool" per se, but the vast collection of archive.org is also worth mentioning. There's plenty of great reading, listening, and watching material there, and it also crawls and archives websites too.
meowface 11y ago
>I generally believe that people should be able to delete what they put online I might get some flak for this, but I think the opposite. I think when someone posts something online, it should remain online forever. It's a tragedy that information ever gets deleted. The fact that someone could publish something thousands or even millions of people enjoy and then take it away from them is a shame. Even if it's something only a handful of people enjoy. Even in cases of blatant slander, I don't think censorship or deletion is ever justifiable. In cases of proven slander/libel, some sort of bright red notice should be placed above and below the content indicating a court found it to be false and libelous. People do make mistakes, but I think it's better for information to always be "append-only". If I had some old embarrassing blog posts, I wouldn't delete them, but rather add a warning or disclaimer that I no longer hold those views and regret making that post. I have a lot of embarrassing things about me on the Internet that I wouldn't want an employer to find, from when I was much younger, but which they can find through careful Googling. I just have to accept those things happened, and to try and make a case for why these were mistakes from when I was a teenager and not how I am today. I totally support archives and web scraping, and am appalled by the EU's "right to be forgotten" ruling.
- breakingcups 11y ago
  There can be a lot of reasons to want to delete something you've posted online, a stalker for example. I think it's careless to dismiss all such reasons in one swoop.
  - meowface 11y ago
    I agree that's a valid reason, but on principle, I think they still shouldn't have that option. They should address the stalking directly. Removing content isn't going to dissuade a stalker; it'll probably only make them more interested, honestly.
- madawan 11y ago
  You'll still need to find ways to deal with doxxing and child pornography. Also revenge porn.
  - meowface 11y ago
    Yes, there are certainly some exceptions.
ivank 11y ago
> Any more good archiving tools? For backing up websites, I released https://github.com/ludios/grab-site https://github.com/ludios/grab-site. Compared to HTTrack, it makes it easy to add ignores to skip unwanted URLs after a crawl has already started. It also saves to WARC instead of trying to fit the site to an on-disk directory structure, which is not always possible or useful (e.g. directory with > 100K files).

userbinator 11y ago

Not really a "tool" per se, but the vast collection of archive.org is also worth mentioning. There's plenty of great reading, listening, and watching material there, and it also crawls and archives websites too.

meowface 11y ago

>I generally believe that people should be able to delete what they put online I might get some flak for this, but I think the opposite. I think when someone posts something online, it should remain online forever. It's a tragedy that information ever gets deleted. The fact that someone could publish something thousands or even millions of people enjoy and then take it away from them is a shame. Even if it's something only a handful of people enjoy. Even in cases of blatant slander, I don't think censorship or deletion is ever justifiable. In cases of proven slander/libel, some sort of bright red notice should be placed above and below the content indicating a court found it to be false and libelous. People do make mistakes, but I think it's better for information to always be "append-only". If I had some old embarrassing blog posts, I wouldn't delete them, but rather add a warning or disclaimer that I no longer hold those views and regret making that post. I have a lot of embarrassing things about me on the Internet that I wouldn't want an employer to find, from when I was much younger, but which they can find through careful Googling. I just have to accept those things happened, and to try and make a case for why these were mistakes from when I was a teenager and not how I am today. I totally support archives and web scraping, and am appalled by the EU's "right to be forgotten" ruling.

breakingcups 11y ago
There can be a lot of reasons to want to delete something you've posted online, a stalker for example. I think it's careless to dismiss all such reasons in one swoop.
- meowface 11y ago
  I agree that's a valid reason, but on principle, I think they still shouldn't have that option. They should address the stalking directly. Removing content isn't going to dissuade a stalker; it'll probably only make them more interested, honestly.
madawan 11y ago
You'll still need to find ways to deal with doxxing and child pornography. Also revenge porn.
- meowface 11y ago
  Yes, there are certainly some exceptions.

ivank 11y ago

> Any more good archiving tools? For backing up websites, I released https://github.com/ludios/grab-site https://github.com/ludios/grab-site. Compared to HTTrack, it makes it easy to add ignores to skip unwanted URLs after a crawl has already started. It also saves to WARC instead of trying to fit the site to an on-disk directory structure, which is not always possible or useful (e.g. directory with > 100K files).