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I wish Gentoo in particular had more of its history still saved. You can download day-by-day snapshots of the "Portage" tree for the package manager to know wha

I wish Gentoo in particular had more of its history still saved. You can download day-by-day snapshots of the "Portage" tree for the package manager to know what packages to build, but actually building software requires googling for ancient tarballs and piecing together a "distfiles" directory one by one, typically without Gentoo's own patches(!) There was an attempt a while back to try and get it recovered, but the developer "Robbat" who claimed to have old tape backups never replied https://bugs.gentoo.org/834712#c4 https://bugs.gentoo.org/834712#c4

codetrotter 4y ago
> the developer "Robbat" who claimed to have old tape backups never replied Reminds me of that old story of a company that was diligently putting tapes into their tape writers every day for backups, and stored the backup tapes securely so that in the event of disaster they could recover from the tapes. One day disaster strikes. They fetch the most recent backup tapes and attempt to restore their data but the tapes are blank. They try the tapes from the day before. Blank. And the day before that and the day before that. They try all of the tapes. Every single tape is blank. They had been putting backup tapes into the machine for years. But the machine had never actually written anything to any of the tapes. And no-one had checked to see if there was any data on the tapes until the day when they needed the data and it was already too late. This story is meant to teach people that having a backup routine is not enough. You need to verify that the backups are actually working. That all of the data is actually being backed up.