7 ms·

A note to young folks: download the things you love

318 points by ingve 3y ago

blackkettle 3y ago
Make sure to keep a copy of a compatible OS handy too. Perhaps hardware as well. The relentless march towards obsolescence is hard to stop.
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  Also wherever possible, choose formats that are standardized openly and free/libre implementations exist for reading them.
v64 3y ago
Can't access the site currently, but thankfully the Wayback Machine downloaded it: https://web.archive.org/web/20230829063148/https://birchtree.me/blog/a-note-to-young-folks-download-the-videos-you-love/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230829063148/https://birchtree...
- katella 3y ago
  ty
- ndusart 3y ago
  Ironically, this supports the message of the article :D
- livrem 3y ago
  In the spirit of the linked article, remember to also save local copies of interesting stuff from archive.org, because of things like this: https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive
  - ehPReth 3y ago
    oh no :(. I wonder if those are hosted elsewhere…
    - hashhar 3y ago
      yes, see IPFS and Magnet links at https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/i2btuu/utzoo_archives_have_been_removed_from_archiveorg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/i2btuu/utzoo_a...
      - ehPReth 3y ago
        thank you! :)
roguesupport 3y ago
[dead]
checkyoursudo 3y ago
But, really, I wish I had only downloaded the things that I really love. Don't be like how young-me was. I downloaded everything I was even remotely interested in. Now I have too much, and apprehend the process of weeding out what I don't love. The issue is not space. The issue is the hoarding itself, and the messiness that is inherent in that.
- blowski 3y ago
  On the other hand, stumbling through some of that old crap can be wonderful. It’s like reading old diaries.
  - tamimio 3y ago
    Can’t agree more! The other day I found an old hdd I had since 2006, and the amount of stuff in there left me with mixed feelings, happy, sad, nostalgic, all at once going through all those memories.. I did back it up but most likely won’t open soon from how I felt. I remember I also had an external hdd, the first external one I ever had back in 2003, where I had all my files in there, sad part is, it died I think around 2009, and young me wasn’t techie enough to recover the data, so it’s all gone.
- thenoblesunfish 3y ago
  An excellent point - if you have a well-curated set of things in your library, that's a great way to rediscover your favorites, or make recommendations to friends.
- ghusto 3y ago
  I downloaded everything and am glad I did. Every so often I dig through it and re-discover things I'd forgotten about. It's like physical hoarding: If everything's organised, it's a delight in years to come, but if it's in a big box-o-crap, then it's the same as not having it at all (worse, I guess, since it takes up space).
  - feitingen 3y ago
    I completely agree. Cost of digital storage has just completely plummeted, and keeping stuff organized, even remotely, really makes for enjoyable rediscovery. Even the mediocre stuff is nice to go through if it's sorted. Old photos, videos and other original content is the best stuff to save for when you're older.
tezza 3y ago
Too true: I lost access to a really good Commodore 64 chip tune track hosted on youtube It was a funky(!) version of the Wizardry game tune. One day youtube purged many “copyrighted” videos and somehow this marvellous version was disappeared forever. I had been putting it off downloading it because I figured it was too obscure.
- dendrite9 3y ago
  Somewhere on the internet at one point there was an upbeat song about the inevitable heat death of the universe. Possibly with a ukelele and almost certainly from Australia. Every so often I'll do search for it but I've never found it again after the first few times I heard it. I should have downloaded when that was an option.
  - RufusJacksons 3y ago
    It wasn’t this gem was it? Your description reminded me of it regardless https://youtu.be/kCpjgl2baLs?si=RwghR9uyjER0S68Q https://youtu.be/kCpjgl2baLs?si=RwghR9uyjER0S68Q
    - dendrite9 3y ago
      Ha, nope not that one. Although it's hard to believe that is nearly 20 years old.
ViVr 3y ago
Information wants to be free but might be losing the battle regardless. The siren call of centralization lures in too many people who only realize the implications when it's too late. On most projects and topics i work on i keep personal notes. Sometimes i copy entire pieces of information from websites into my notes so that i don't lose it when the website dies. Any interesting webpage i at least archive through both archive.today and archive.org. Eventually i might look into taking that locally as well.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  Since archive.org is now getting into a court battle that doesn't look good for them, it would be prudent to make local copies of anything you want to save on there, in case the whole site disappears.
madaxe_again 3y ago
I was a filthy pirate as a teenager, and in my early 20s, when I would balk at paying £20 in 1990s money to buy a DVD, or later in the early 2000s £60 for a blu-ray. Then streaming arrived. I stopped pirating as finally I could pay for legal access to a couple (prime, netflix) of decent media libraries. Over the past few years, as the market has fragmented into a dozen £30 a month services, I started pirating again. I’m not spending £300 a month on streaming services, nor should anybody. Then, they started pulling content from their libraries, or editing it to suit today’s sensitive sensibilities - and this cemented my conviction that what I was doing was justified. Now that I have a vault stuffed full of UHD rips of a century of cinema, the other argument which has become self-apparent is quality. The UHD content streaming services serve looks like vegetable soup in comparison to a 70gb+ encode of a film, and is worsening as streaming services seek to be profitable. I see another cycle of the same type of anti-MPAA/RIAA movement brewing as was seen around deCSS etc. last time - as they are once again going down the same route of making the only offering a crappy and overpriced offering, and the alternative is easier than it ever was before.
- rado 3y ago
  This + geo locked streaming/payment. I am never sure what Prime will allow me to pay for and watch.
- jasonvorhe 3y ago
  Same here. When I still bought on Amazon, paying a few bucks for free shipping was acceptable and when they increased prices slightly to accommodate for their streaming service I shrugged it of. Netflix and Prime covered about 60% of what I needed and for the remainder, like niche movies, there was either Mubi or piracy/torrents. Now that Netflix is increasing its prices and kicking off account sharers while losing content to Paramount/Disney/Apple/whatever I've cancelled all subscriptions and I'm back to piracy/torrents. I'm only paying for Crunchyroll now because hunting down Anime in good quality with working subtitles is too cumbersome. Unfortunately the app is terrible to use and unreliable as well but still slightly less so than the piracy sites.
Brajeshwar 3y ago
An early and an always work-in-progress but I have started documenting my way of doing this. Not everything but I want to be able to own the contents and leverage everything else as tools/utilities (as far as and however as possible). I will continue to detail this out to include the options, how-tos, etc. https://notes.oinam.com/digital/ https://notes.oinam.com/digital/
suzzer99 3y ago
So many great forum posts from the mid-2000s, ruined by Imageshack crapping out. Couldn't they just sell their image store to imgUr or something? I wonder if it's gone forever.
- samtho 3y ago
  Also photobucket’s and tinypic purges. I do a lot of work on my 2010-2015 era VW GTI and so much knowledge is gone already. Imgur is no different, they purged images who were posted “anonymously” and anything they consider NSFW. They are very much part of the problem.
bowsamic 3y ago
I feel like this is a cope against increasing entropy
j7ake 3y ago
I find it good to have a two tier system: first tier are things you “like”. You thought it was cool but 90 percent of the time you will never look at it again. However, if you need to find it again a second or third time, then put some effort into putting those things in a permanent and easy to access storage, maybe even physical. This way you keep only things you really love, rather than a gigantic horde of mediocre things you thought was cool at the time but is not useful.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- alpaca128 3y ago
  The number of videos on YT alone that could not be found again a second time or that were just replaced with [deleted video] from the list of favorites without any hint what video it even was is easily in the two digits by now. Sometimes you simply don't remember the title accurately enough to ever find it again. Hundreds of my bookmarks cannot be accessed anymore. Nope, I just download everything that I really like. Storage is cheap.
  - j7ake 3y ago
    Downloading everything you like is first tier. The second time you search for it, that thing gets put in another tier away from the vast sea of no longer useful things.
  - RetroTechie 3y ago
    Physical storage under your own control, rules. But when choosing what to save or not, I do apply some criteria: * Popular / obscure? Obscure stuff may disappear easily. Popular stuff will be online somewhere. * Freely available, or paywalled content? (how easy to obtain) * Recently released, or 'oldie'? See above. * Storage space (+ download time!). I'll be much more critical about saving a multi-GB BluRay rip than some funny pics, a few-hundred KB pdf or game dump for 30y old console. * An educated guess about whether I'll ever want to use it again. So what I end up saving, tends to be on the smaller side, sometimes difficult-to-find-online, and with 'replay value' (broadly defined). Watch once & forget movie -> delete. I don't want to devote brain cells (now, or in future) on stuff that isn't worth revisiting.
h417652303 3y ago
it makes sense
vertis 3y ago
I think about this a lot recently. I've been using computers since the 80s in one form or another, but so much of "the early stuff" is just lost -- Amiga floppy disks that got taken and not returned. Content I did backup is in formats for apps that no longer exist. Aside from personal examples there is also all of the "right to repair", DRM, type stuff that gets taken down from YouTube, GitHub. There are exotic examples like TornadoCash (for AML rather than the above categories), but there are far more mundane examples of content just disappearing as well. I've started a personal setup of mirroring the top starred repos and downloading youtube channels for content that I consider important (there is, of course, too much for me to capture it all). It fits into my thinking about the Long Now. Working in formats that can be opened in 100 or 1000 years. I don't have the hubris to think my own content is particularly remarkable and worthy of persisting for 1000 years, if I find other peoples content interesting though I can help persist that for the future. For my personal knowledge base I use Obsidian and link everything (including downloaded YouTube videos). I also use the Firefox extension "SingleFile" which allows the easy capture of web pages that you're reading (and supports a direct upload to github, which then publishes to vercel). It's far from perfect but it's better than some of my early knowledge base efforts where I've come back and clicked on links only to find that they've disappeared (and in some case not even on the Wayback Machine).
- midoridensha 3y ago
  >It fits into my thinking about the Long Now. Working in formats that can be opened in 100 or 1000 years. This is a real problem for old stuff from decades ago, but much less so now: as long as the data is in some format that uses open-source code to read (i.e., open-source A/V codecs), you just have to make sure the source code is available for it. A lot of data from ages ago is really hard to decipher because it was stored in proprietary formats, and the specifications and code for those are lost or difficult to find. Data stored as PDF or h.264, for instance, probably won't have this problem.
bmitc 3y ago
Time only flows in one direction.
ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
I do worry about the loss of so many films and TV series from our culture. With streaming services, they often don't bother with hosting obscure and older media, so lesser known gems can just disappear without most people even realising. I hoard old scifi films and series (along with anything that I find of interest) and sometimes, the only copy that I can find has been posted to YouTube by some kind sole (as opposed to the copyright holder). One particular service that really bugs me is the BBC iPlayer. The search is atrocious, so it's one of those sites that it's easier to do a search for "iplayer ..." in google etc. rather than using the BBC's own search. However, what really bugs me are the time restrictions and removal of programmes when as a TV license payer (which is how the BBC is funded), I've already paid towards the production of those programmes. e.g. The excellent Oppenheimer series from the 1980s wasn't previously available on iPlayer despite being a BBC production and after the new film was released, the series was entirely available on YouTube, but not the BBC (they've since made it available).
- midoridensha 3y ago
  >the only copy that I can find has been posted to YouTube by some kind sole Are you saying that people are using their feet to post videos to YouTube, or that there are actually fish that use computers now? If fish have become this intelligent, we're in trouble.
- BoxOfRain 3y ago
  Blame the restrictions on the BBC, even though they got an early start on streaming the government didn't want them to compete too much with commercial offerings which meant iPlayer was crippled from the start. I always thought this was daft, if I had to choose between the BBC and one of Rupert Murdoch's offerings I wouldn't even have to think.
- walthamstow 3y ago
  > However, what really bugs me are the time restrictions and removal of programmes when as a TV license payer (which is how the BBC is funded), I've already paid towards the production of those programmes. Couldn't agree more and would represent a real monetisation opportunity for the BBC even within the UK, if they are even legally allowed to do so. How much would you pay per month for access to the BBC archives? I would pay quite a bit. It doesn't even have to be streaming. Let's say you put in a ticket one day requesting that Oppenheimer show and a few days or weeks later, you get a temporary download link sent to you by email.
mrweasel 3y ago
I really wish I had been more of a data-hoarder earlier in my life. There are a ton of videos, podcasts and articles that I'd love to have access to today. Much of it might not be super relevant, e.g. there where a silly podcast called "We hate tech" hosted by two super inappropriate systems administrators, but I'd love to relisten, but it's gone. Videos from conferences who's websites are no long around. Sadly I was never much of an archivist, but every so often I stumple on an old harddisk or thumbdrive with a small time capsule of my life many years ago.
totetsu 3y ago
Downloading is the easy part. Its finding those files again after 20 years of disk and system migrations that the hard part. I think those stacks of cds with lables written in now running marker ink are the most identifiable, but i dont have a disc drive anymore.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Or understanding what the they are. Me after downloading all of my DRM free purchases. With plenty of lovely names some going back to good old 8.3 character filenames... So in first place remember what you have and then try to map them like puzzle...
- Zambyte 3y ago
  I recommend building a digital zettlekasten for discovery. IMO that is the easiest way to organize things in a way that is discoverable when you actually look for them. I personally use org-roam for this, but there are several options available.
droptablemain 3y ago
Indeed at times it does feel that the old Internet is dying from link rot. I've recently ventured into modding the original (not enhanced) Infinity Engine games, and many of the utilities and tools used have been lost to the ether.
Obscurity4340 3y ago
SiteRipper's a great tool for this.
theshrike79 3y ago
Same goes in the other direction. Keep the content you create somewhere you control. People have actually figured out a fancy acronym for it too: https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE > POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content. Way too many (younger?) people expect social media platforms to be forever and keep that as the only place their content exists to a point where it's a part of their identity. And when that goes away, they practically disappear too - people don't have any alternative ways of contacting them.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  >people don't have any alternative ways of contacting them. This reminds me of a coworker I wanted to keep in contact with, but who only used Discord.
yellow_lead 3y ago
I'm regretting not downloading the video of dog baseball from YouTube. I can't seem to find it anymore.
ulrischa 3y ago
I still search for a good way to save websites. PDF is not very good. Some ideas?
- tenebrisalietum 3y ago
  The browser extension called "SingleFile" is good at reliabily saving most (not all) webpages into a single self-contained HTML file, in my opinion.
dryanau 3y ago
What's the best medium to store on? I see USB thumb drives with 512GB capacity these days. Easy to write a couple and keep in the cupboard. Or is hard disk better? External USB?
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Depends on how long you will want to last and how much performance you want. Personally I would likely go with external HDDs. Least risk of bit rot.
- thom 3y ago
  The ‘best’ is probably some sort of heterogenous RAID/ZFS mirror setup which can survive the death of disks and potentially evolve over decades. Then you want at least two versions in different sites that are kept in sync in case of a disaster or a RAID controller going bonkers.
- joshspankit 3y ago
  Whatever you use, add PAR (parity) files. Personally I would lean towards SSDs mainly because an HDD failure can mean a broken mechanism and a nightmare recovery process while an SSD typically fails by becoming read-only. (Good-brand) thumb drives are also a solid option especially if you make multiple drives containing the same data and store some off-site.
- cableshaft 3y ago
  Still might be discs. Not the common consumer discs we've all gotten in the the past, but there are archival-grade DVDs and Blu Rays out there that are supposed to last hundreds of years and not degrade. Been debating getting a few and burning some of my more important stuff on a few of these: https://www.mdisc.com/ https://www.mdisc.com/
squirrel6 3y ago
I think about this constantly. For me, it’s less about content I enjoy but more about things that really made an impact on the way that I think and therefore have changed my life in some way. When we die, most of what we have will undoubtedly be considered detritus, our “junk”. However, our reflections on that material may be much more valuable, elucidating how we thought and how we were able to make some difference in the world; I know I personally enjoy reading my late grandfather’s writing about books and articles he read. I think Tumblr was probably the closest we came to having some kind of media journal, but scribbling marginalia on printed Medium posts is a close second (joking mostly).
genieyclo 3y ago
Relevant to the topic: if anyone can help me find the song “No Guidance” by Claudio Souza Mattos. I heard it last summer in an Amsterdam shop and was hooked for months. Then suddenly, the whole album “Classics Revisited” was yanked from all streaming services and is impossible to find. Desperate for help here.
- ragazzina 3y ago
  Have you tried writing an email to the artist?
OliveMate 3y ago
My extra advice, make a note of who made what you downloaded and where you downloaded it from to help yourself and others in the future. I recently built a new PC and, while I didn't migrate everything I saved, I made sure to keep my old system around for a few weeks just in case I needed anything. Someone in a community I was in asked if someone had a link to some old Call of Duty shitpost from a decade ago, and I immediately recognised what they were on about. But a good hour spent scouring my early YouTube likes revealed nothing, so I dragged the old rig back in, powered it on, lo and behold within a minute I'd found the exact video I must've saved eons back. No idea who created the said video, but I'm sure that if I noted a name or channel URL, there'd be a lot more missing media out there which others would be looking for. -- On one hand, I respect the fact that YouTube facilitates a level of privacy when you delete or hide things, obfuscating any trace of the video from playlists, etc. But on the other hand, the amount of times I've known I've added a video to a playlist only for it to be deleted with no trace... Yeah, it can suck. Recently turning a lot of unlisted videos into private ones hasn't helped in that respect either.
- Springtime 3y ago
  yt-dlp which the article links allows for auto filenaming templates that support channel name (or ID though it consumes more filename length) and the service it was from (eg: Youtube, Vimeo, Reddit). If you add the option to save metadata to the video (with the required dependencies) it also saves the full URL to the file, depending on the service. A more robust method is also saving the full metadata to a separate JSON (though if one likes to rename files then it has to be remembered to rename both the files).
- fragmede 3y ago
  > while I didn't migrate everything I saved Given the rest of your comment, that seems like an interesting decision. Why not migrate everything?
  - OliveMate 3y ago
    Really it's a bit daft. The secondary SSD I ordered didn't arrive for a while, and I got inpatient. I moved as much as I could onto some spare USB sticks and used them to pass the files along to the new build. I prioritised my photo archive (backed up online too) and project files first, then music, and then assorted videos and images. I prioritised the ones which spoke to me the most, which I came back to often, those which inspired nostalgia, and those which I felt would probably be gone in the next few years. It's a little short sighted, but I was strapped for storage. The migration was only this month, and while I wiped my old SSD to use as an extra drive in this build, the harddrive which contained my old downloads folder is still in my possession... And only now is it coming to me that I can just plug it in to my current build and transfer the files -- In terms of proper backups, I've yet to get something set up. My photo archives are backed up online and on multiple USB drives, and everything I migrated is on my new build and also on a series of USB drives... Again, I'll probably prioritise personal files moreso than random videos I downloaded, but it's given me food for thought.
RGamma 3y ago
And save some memories you made while e.g. online gaming. Why should that be any different from RL?
dusted 3y ago
Indeed, the internet is the most permanent looking transitory thing ever. Sure, we have arvhive.org.. but that didn't always exist, and it might not always (no matter how much I want it to). Build your digital life with this in mind, everything that ever matter to you in the slightest, must be stored on devices that are under your control. I'm afraid of the future, I'm afraid of the day where I can no longer install Linux, and then, of the day where I can no longer build my own PC from parts, and the day when I can no longer buy a general purpose computer at all. When, not if, but when that day comes, all I have left are whatever cutting edge devices of the last generations I have in inventory, and I will be stuck in time, and I will be content with that, until my hardware supply dried out and I'm back into the world.. Hopefully I die first.
- captainbland 3y ago
  Even for devices you own, storage options are often only rated to last a decade or less (although they might do better in practice, it becomes a gamble). Options like printing photos start making a lot of sense when you're thinking about the span of your life and maybe even up to your grandchildren's.
  - dusted 3y ago
    A agree. I buy a new datacenter disk every 2 months and swap out the oldest in my primary storage, the swapped out goes to the cold-storage backup server. But this is expensive and cumbersome and I am aware that I'm a liability, if I die, my family have limited access to my data. I'm preparing instructions so that they can extract it, I'm keeping the family-relevant parts of the data on a read-only share that multiple family members can access. Of course, if the server goes down while I die, little hope is left. Printing out photos is definitely a good start.
    - joshspankit 3y ago
      You might be interested in something like B2. They have parity data and consistently validate all data stored with them as well as having multiple copies of your data in different geographic locations. And the cost is decent at $5/TB/mo (it has gone down over time). The server can easily sync changes on a schedule and if there are concerns about privacy you can also encrypt before sending (add your decryption key to the instructions).
iAkashPaul 3y ago
Hard drives for us have become the CDs from our parents generations. Westworld RIP
largolagrande 3y ago
For podcasts downloads, I highly recommend Greg (https://github.com/manolomartinez/greg https://github.com/manolomartinez/greg)
JamesLeonis 3y ago
Save all of your code. Yes, even those weird goofy projects. It's fun to go back and read it all again. I still have code I've written in high school and university, including a game that a friend and I implemented almost entirely inside a single C++ function. I also now regularly use old code as a kind of mental bookmark about things I've implemented previously. When I'm working on a solution to something I'll sometimes have deja-vu, and I'm glad I still have the old code.
- pwpw 3y ago
  I would love my own personal and local version of a code assistant like GitHub copilot trained entirely on my code. It would be interesting to see how it captures my style and how it would evolve over time. I regret deleting my code from my college courses. I’ve kept everything since then.
mikewarot 3y ago
If only there were a system that recorded hypertext, allowing you to both annotate it, and share with your friends (by generating a distributable copy on demand).[1] /s [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think
MalcolmWillis 3y ago
[dead]

318 points by ingve 3y ago

Make sure to keep a copy of a compatible OS handy too. Perhaps hardware as well. The relentless march towards obsolescence is hard to stop.

zelphirkalt 3y ago
Also wherever possible, choose formats that are standardized openly and free/libre implementations exist for reading them.

v64 3y ago

Can't access the site currently, but thankfully the Wayback Machine downloaded it: https://web.archive.org/web/20230829063148/https://birchtree.me/blog/a-note-to-young-folks-download-the-videos-you-love/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230829063148/https://birchtree...

katella 3y ago
ty
ndusart 3y ago
Ironically, this supports the message of the article :D
livrem 3y ago
In the spirit of the linked article, remember to also save local copies of interesting stuff from archive.org, because of things like this: https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive
- ehPReth 3y ago
  oh no :(. I wonder if those are hosted elsewhere…
  - hashhar 3y ago
    yes, see IPFS and Magnet links at https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/i2btuu/utzoo_archives_have_been_removed_from_archiveorg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/i2btuu/utzoo_a...
    - ehPReth 3y ago
      thank you! :)

roguesupport 3y ago

[dead]

checkyoursudo 3y ago

But, really, I wish I had only downloaded the things that I really love. Don't be like how young-me was. I downloaded everything I was even remotely interested in. Now I have too much, and apprehend the process of weeding out what I don't love. The issue is not space. The issue is the hoarding itself, and the messiness that is inherent in that.

blowski 3y ago
On the other hand, stumbling through some of that old crap can be wonderful. It’s like reading old diaries.
- tamimio 3y ago
  Can’t agree more! The other day I found an old hdd I had since 2006, and the amount of stuff in there left me with mixed feelings, happy, sad, nostalgic, all at once going through all those memories.. I did back it up but most likely won’t open soon from how I felt. I remember I also had an external hdd, the first external one I ever had back in 2003, where I had all my files in there, sad part is, it died I think around 2009, and young me wasn’t techie enough to recover the data, so it’s all gone.
thenoblesunfish 3y ago
An excellent point - if you have a well-curated set of things in your library, that's a great way to rediscover your favorites, or make recommendations to friends.
ghusto 3y ago
I downloaded everything and am glad I did. Every so often I dig through it and re-discover things I'd forgotten about. It's like physical hoarding: If everything's organised, it's a delight in years to come, but if it's in a big box-o-crap, then it's the same as not having it at all (worse, I guess, since it takes up space).
- feitingen 3y ago
  I completely agree. Cost of digital storage has just completely plummeted, and keeping stuff organized, even remotely, really makes for enjoyable rediscovery. Even the mediocre stuff is nice to go through if it's sorted. Old photos, videos and other original content is the best stuff to save for when you're older.

tezza 3y ago

Too true: I lost access to a really good Commodore 64 chip tune track hosted on youtube It was a funky(!) version of the Wizardry game tune. One day youtube purged many “copyrighted” videos and somehow this marvellous version was disappeared forever. I had been putting it off downloading it because I figured it was too obscure.

dendrite9 3y ago
Somewhere on the internet at one point there was an upbeat song about the inevitable heat death of the universe. Possibly with a ukelele and almost certainly from Australia. Every so often I'll do search for it but I've never found it again after the first few times I heard it. I should have downloaded when that was an option.
- RufusJacksons 3y ago
  It wasn’t this gem was it? Your description reminded me of it regardless https://youtu.be/kCpjgl2baLs?si=RwghR9uyjER0S68Q https://youtu.be/kCpjgl2baLs?si=RwghR9uyjER0S68Q
  - dendrite9 3y ago
    Ha, nope not that one. Although it's hard to believe that is nearly 20 years old.

ViVr 3y ago

Information wants to be free but might be losing the battle regardless. The siren call of centralization lures in too many people who only realize the implications when it's too late. On most projects and topics i work on i keep personal notes. Sometimes i copy entire pieces of information from websites into my notes so that i don't lose it when the website dies. Any interesting webpage i at least archive through both archive.today and archive.org. Eventually i might look into taking that locally as well.

midoridensha 3y ago
Since archive.org is now getting into a court battle that doesn't look good for them, it would be prudent to make local copies of anything you want to save on there, in case the whole site disappears.

madaxe_again 3y ago

I was a filthy pirate as a teenager, and in my early 20s, when I would balk at paying £20 in 1990s money to buy a DVD, or later in the early 2000s £60 for a blu-ray. Then streaming arrived. I stopped pirating as finally I could pay for legal access to a couple (prime, netflix) of decent media libraries. Over the past few years, as the market has fragmented into a dozen £30 a month services, I started pirating again. I’m not spending £300 a month on streaming services, nor should anybody. Then, they started pulling content from their libraries, or editing it to suit today’s sensitive sensibilities - and this cemented my conviction that what I was doing was justified. Now that I have a vault stuffed full of UHD rips of a century of cinema, the other argument which has become self-apparent is quality. The UHD content streaming services serve looks like vegetable soup in comparison to a 70gb+ encode of a film, and is worsening as streaming services seek to be profitable. I see another cycle of the same type of anti-MPAA/RIAA movement brewing as was seen around deCSS etc. last time - as they are once again going down the same route of making the only offering a crappy and overpriced offering, and the alternative is easier than it ever was before.

rado 3y ago
This + geo locked streaming/payment. I am never sure what Prime will allow me to pay for and watch.
jasonvorhe 3y ago
Same here. When I still bought on Amazon, paying a few bucks for free shipping was acceptable and when they increased prices slightly to accommodate for their streaming service I shrugged it of. Netflix and Prime covered about 60% of what I needed and for the remainder, like niche movies, there was either Mubi or piracy/torrents. Now that Netflix is increasing its prices and kicking off account sharers while losing content to Paramount/Disney/Apple/whatever I've cancelled all subscriptions and I'm back to piracy/torrents. I'm only paying for Crunchyroll now because hunting down Anime in good quality with working subtitles is too cumbersome. Unfortunately the app is terrible to use and unreliable as well but still slightly less so than the piracy sites.

Brajeshwar 3y ago

An early and an always work-in-progress but I have started documenting my way of doing this. Not everything but I want to be able to own the contents and leverage everything else as tools/utilities (as far as and however as possible). I will continue to detail this out to include the options, how-tos, etc. https://notes.oinam.com/digital/ https://notes.oinam.com/digital/

suzzer99 3y ago

So many great forum posts from the mid-2000s, ruined by Imageshack crapping out. Couldn't they just sell their image store to imgUr or something? I wonder if it's gone forever.

samtho 3y ago
Also photobucket’s and tinypic purges. I do a lot of work on my 2010-2015 era VW GTI and so much knowledge is gone already. Imgur is no different, they purged images who were posted “anonymously” and anything they consider NSFW. They are very much part of the problem.

bowsamic 3y ago

I feel like this is a cope against increasing entropy

j7ake 3y ago

I find it good to have a two tier system: first tier are things you “like”. You thought it was cool but 90 percent of the time you will never look at it again. However, if you need to find it again a second or third time, then put some effort into putting those things in a permanent and easy to access storage, maybe even physical. This way you keep only things you really love, rather than a gigantic horde of mediocre things you thought was cool at the time but is not useful.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
alpaca128 3y ago
The number of videos on YT alone that could not be found again a second time or that were just replaced with [deleted video] from the list of favorites without any hint what video it even was is easily in the two digits by now. Sometimes you simply don't remember the title accurately enough to ever find it again. Hundreds of my bookmarks cannot be accessed anymore. Nope, I just download everything that I really like. Storage is cheap.
- j7ake 3y ago
  Downloading everything you like is first tier. The second time you search for it, that thing gets put in another tier away from the vast sea of no longer useful things.
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  Physical storage under your own control, rules. But when choosing what to save or not, I do apply some criteria: * Popular / obscure? Obscure stuff may disappear easily. Popular stuff will be online somewhere. * Freely available, or paywalled content? (how easy to obtain) * Recently released, or 'oldie'? See above. * Storage space (+ download time!). I'll be much more critical about saving a multi-GB BluRay rip than some funny pics, a few-hundred KB pdf or game dump for 30y old console. * An educated guess about whether I'll ever want to use it again. So what I end up saving, tends to be on the smaller side, sometimes difficult-to-find-online, and with 'replay value' (broadly defined). Watch once & forget movie -> delete. I don't want to devote brain cells (now, or in future) on stuff that isn't worth revisiting.

h417652303 3y ago

it makes sense

vertis 3y ago

I think about this a lot recently. I've been using computers since the 80s in one form or another, but so much of "the early stuff" is just lost -- Amiga floppy disks that got taken and not returned. Content I did backup is in formats for apps that no longer exist. Aside from personal examples there is also all of the "right to repair", DRM, type stuff that gets taken down from YouTube, GitHub. There are exotic examples like TornadoCash (for AML rather than the above categories), but there are far more mundane examples of content just disappearing as well. I've started a personal setup of mirroring the top starred repos and downloading youtube channels for content that I consider important (there is, of course, too much for me to capture it all). It fits into my thinking about the Long Now. Working in formats that can be opened in 100 or 1000 years. I don't have the hubris to think my own content is particularly remarkable and worthy of persisting for 1000 years, if I find other peoples content interesting though I can help persist that for the future. For my personal knowledge base I use Obsidian and link everything (including downloaded YouTube videos). I also use the Firefox extension "SingleFile" which allows the easy capture of web pages that you're reading (and supports a direct upload to github, which then publishes to vercel). It's far from perfect but it's better than some of my early knowledge base efforts where I've come back and clicked on links only to find that they've disappeared (and in some case not even on the Wayback Machine).

midoridensha 3y ago
>It fits into my thinking about the Long Now. Working in formats that can be opened in 100 or 1000 years. This is a real problem for old stuff from decades ago, but much less so now: as long as the data is in some format that uses open-source code to read (i.e., open-source A/V codecs), you just have to make sure the source code is available for it. A lot of data from ages ago is really hard to decipher because it was stored in proprietary formats, and the specifications and code for those are lost or difficult to find. Data stored as PDF or h.264, for instance, probably won't have this problem.

bmitc 3y ago

Time only flows in one direction.

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago

I do worry about the loss of so many films and TV series from our culture. With streaming services, they often don't bother with hosting obscure and older media, so lesser known gems can just disappear without most people even realising. I hoard old scifi films and series (along with anything that I find of interest) and sometimes, the only copy that I can find has been posted to YouTube by some kind sole (as opposed to the copyright holder). One particular service that really bugs me is the BBC iPlayer. The search is atrocious, so it's one of those sites that it's easier to do a search for "iplayer ..." in google etc. rather than using the BBC's own search. However, what really bugs me are the time restrictions and removal of programmes when as a TV license payer (which is how the BBC is funded), I've already paid towards the production of those programmes. e.g. The excellent Oppenheimer series from the 1980s wasn't previously available on iPlayer despite being a BBC production and after the new film was released, the series was entirely available on YouTube, but not the BBC (they've since made it available).

midoridensha 3y ago
>the only copy that I can find has been posted to YouTube by some kind sole Are you saying that people are using their feet to post videos to YouTube, or that there are actually fish that use computers now? If fish have become this intelligent, we're in trouble.
BoxOfRain 3y ago
Blame the restrictions on the BBC, even though they got an early start on streaming the government didn't want them to compete too much with commercial offerings which meant iPlayer was crippled from the start. I always thought this was daft, if I had to choose between the BBC and one of Rupert Murdoch's offerings I wouldn't even have to think.
walthamstow 3y ago
> However, what really bugs me are the time restrictions and removal of programmes when as a TV license payer (which is how the BBC is funded), I've already paid towards the production of those programmes. Couldn't agree more and would represent a real monetisation opportunity for the BBC even within the UK, if they are even legally allowed to do so. How much would you pay per month for access to the BBC archives? I would pay quite a bit. It doesn't even have to be streaming. Let's say you put in a ticket one day requesting that Oppenheimer show and a few days or weeks later, you get a temporary download link sent to you by email.

mrweasel 3y ago

I really wish I had been more of a data-hoarder earlier in my life. There are a ton of videos, podcasts and articles that I'd love to have access to today. Much of it might not be super relevant, e.g. there where a silly podcast called "We hate tech" hosted by two super inappropriate systems administrators, but I'd love to relisten, but it's gone. Videos from conferences who's websites are no long around. Sadly I was never much of an archivist, but every so often I stumple on an old harddisk or thumbdrive with a small time capsule of my life many years ago.

totetsu 3y ago

Downloading is the easy part. Its finding those files again after 20 years of disk and system migrations that the hard part. I think those stacks of cds with lables written in now running marker ink are the most identifiable, but i dont have a disc drive anymore.

Ekaros 3y ago
Or understanding what the they are. Me after downloading all of my DRM free purchases. With plenty of lovely names some going back to good old 8.3 character filenames... So in first place remember what you have and then try to map them like puzzle...
Zambyte 3y ago
I recommend building a digital zettlekasten for discovery. IMO that is the easiest way to organize things in a way that is discoverable when you actually look for them. I personally use org-roam for this, but there are several options available.

droptablemain 3y ago

Indeed at times it does feel that the old Internet is dying from link rot. I've recently ventured into modding the original (not enhanced) Infinity Engine games, and many of the utilities and tools used have been lost to the ether.

Obscurity4340 3y ago

SiteRipper's a great tool for this.

theshrike79 3y ago

Same goes in the other direction. Keep the content you create somewhere you control. People have actually figured out a fancy acronym for it too: https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE > POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content. Way too many (younger?) people expect social media platforms to be forever and keep that as the only place their content exists to a point where it's a part of their identity. And when that goes away, they practically disappear too - people don't have any alternative ways of contacting them.

midoridensha 3y ago
>people don't have any alternative ways of contacting them. This reminds me of a coworker I wanted to keep in contact with, but who only used Discord.

yellow_lead 3y ago

I'm regretting not downloading the video of dog baseball from YouTube. I can't seem to find it anymore.

ulrischa 3y ago

I still search for a good way to save websites. PDF is not very good. Some ideas?

tenebrisalietum 3y ago
The browser extension called "SingleFile" is good at reliabily saving most (not all) webpages into a single self-contained HTML file, in my opinion.

dryanau 3y ago

What's the best medium to store on? I see USB thumb drives with 512GB capacity these days. Easy to write a couple and keep in the cupboard. Or is hard disk better? External USB?

Ekaros 3y ago
Depends on how long you will want to last and how much performance you want. Personally I would likely go with external HDDs. Least risk of bit rot.
thom 3y ago
The ‘best’ is probably some sort of heterogenous RAID/ZFS mirror setup which can survive the death of disks and potentially evolve over decades. Then you want at least two versions in different sites that are kept in sync in case of a disaster or a RAID controller going bonkers.
joshspankit 3y ago
Whatever you use, add PAR (parity) files. Personally I would lean towards SSDs mainly because an HDD failure can mean a broken mechanism and a nightmare recovery process while an SSD typically fails by becoming read-only. (Good-brand) thumb drives are also a solid option especially if you make multiple drives containing the same data and store some off-site.
cableshaft 3y ago
Still might be discs. Not the common consumer discs we've all gotten in the the past, but there are archival-grade DVDs and Blu Rays out there that are supposed to last hundreds of years and not degrade. Been debating getting a few and burning some of my more important stuff on a few of these: https://www.mdisc.com/ https://www.mdisc.com/

squirrel6 3y ago

I think about this constantly. For me, it’s less about content I enjoy but more about things that really made an impact on the way that I think and therefore have changed my life in some way. When we die, most of what we have will undoubtedly be considered detritus, our “junk”. However, our reflections on that material may be much more valuable, elucidating how we thought and how we were able to make some difference in the world; I know I personally enjoy reading my late grandfather’s writing about books and articles he read. I think Tumblr was probably the closest we came to having some kind of media journal, but scribbling marginalia on printed Medium posts is a close second (joking mostly).

genieyclo 3y ago

Relevant to the topic: if anyone can help me find the song “No Guidance” by Claudio Souza Mattos. I heard it last summer in an Amsterdam shop and was hooked for months. Then suddenly, the whole album “Classics Revisited” was yanked from all streaming services and is impossible to find. Desperate for help here.

ragazzina 3y ago
Have you tried writing an email to the artist?

OliveMate 3y ago

My extra advice, make a note of who made what you downloaded and where you downloaded it from to help yourself and others in the future. I recently built a new PC and, while I didn't migrate everything I saved, I made sure to keep my old system around for a few weeks just in case I needed anything. Someone in a community I was in asked if someone had a link to some old Call of Duty shitpost from a decade ago, and I immediately recognised what they were on about. But a good hour spent scouring my early YouTube likes revealed nothing, so I dragged the old rig back in, powered it on, lo and behold within a minute I'd found the exact video I must've saved eons back. No idea who created the said video, but I'm sure that if I noted a name or channel URL, there'd be a lot more missing media out there which others would be looking for. -- On one hand, I respect the fact that YouTube facilitates a level of privacy when you delete or hide things, obfuscating any trace of the video from playlists, etc. But on the other hand, the amount of times I've known I've added a video to a playlist only for it to be deleted with no trace... Yeah, it can suck. Recently turning a lot of unlisted videos into private ones hasn't helped in that respect either.

Springtime 3y ago
yt-dlp which the article links allows for auto filenaming templates that support channel name (or ID though it consumes more filename length) and the service it was from (eg: Youtube, Vimeo, Reddit). If you add the option to save metadata to the video (with the required dependencies) it also saves the full URL to the file, depending on the service. A more robust method is also saving the full metadata to a separate JSON (though if one likes to rename files then it has to be remembered to rename both the files).
fragmede 3y ago
> while I didn't migrate everything I saved Given the rest of your comment, that seems like an interesting decision. Why not migrate everything?
- OliveMate 3y ago
  Really it's a bit daft. The secondary SSD I ordered didn't arrive for a while, and I got inpatient. I moved as much as I could onto some spare USB sticks and used them to pass the files along to the new build. I prioritised my photo archive (backed up online too) and project files first, then music, and then assorted videos and images. I prioritised the ones which spoke to me the most, which I came back to often, those which inspired nostalgia, and those which I felt would probably be gone in the next few years. It's a little short sighted, but I was strapped for storage. The migration was only this month, and while I wiped my old SSD to use as an extra drive in this build, the harddrive which contained my old downloads folder is still in my possession... And only now is it coming to me that I can just plug it in to my current build and transfer the files -- In terms of proper backups, I've yet to get something set up. My photo archives are backed up online and on multiple USB drives, and everything I migrated is on my new build and also on a series of USB drives... Again, I'll probably prioritise personal files moreso than random videos I downloaded, but it's given me food for thought.

RGamma 3y ago

And save some memories you made while e.g. online gaming. Why should that be any different from RL?

dusted 3y ago

Indeed, the internet is the most permanent looking transitory thing ever. Sure, we have arvhive.org.. but that didn't always exist, and it might not always (no matter how much I want it to). Build your digital life with this in mind, everything that ever matter to you in the slightest, must be stored on devices that are under your control. I'm afraid of the future, I'm afraid of the day where I can no longer install Linux, and then, of the day where I can no longer build my own PC from parts, and the day when I can no longer buy a general purpose computer at all. When, not if, but when that day comes, all I have left are whatever cutting edge devices of the last generations I have in inventory, and I will be stuck in time, and I will be content with that, until my hardware supply dried out and I'm back into the world.. Hopefully I die first.

captainbland 3y ago
Even for devices you own, storage options are often only rated to last a decade or less (although they might do better in practice, it becomes a gamble). Options like printing photos start making a lot of sense when you're thinking about the span of your life and maybe even up to your grandchildren's.
- dusted 3y ago
  A agree. I buy a new datacenter disk every 2 months and swap out the oldest in my primary storage, the swapped out goes to the cold-storage backup server. But this is expensive and cumbersome and I am aware that I'm a liability, if I die, my family have limited access to my data. I'm preparing instructions so that they can extract it, I'm keeping the family-relevant parts of the data on a read-only share that multiple family members can access. Of course, if the server goes down while I die, little hope is left. Printing out photos is definitely a good start.
  - joshspankit 3y ago
    You might be interested in something like B2. They have parity data and consistently validate all data stored with them as well as having multiple copies of your data in different geographic locations. And the cost is decent at $5/TB/mo (it has gone down over time). The server can easily sync changes on a schedule and if there are concerns about privacy you can also encrypt before sending (add your decryption key to the instructions).

iAkashPaul 3y ago

Hard drives for us have become the CDs from our parents generations. Westworld RIP

largolagrande 3y ago

For podcasts downloads, I highly recommend Greg (https://github.com/manolomartinez/greg https://github.com/manolomartinez/greg)

JamesLeonis 3y ago

Save all of your code. Yes, even those weird goofy projects. It's fun to go back and read it all again. I still have code I've written in high school and university, including a game that a friend and I implemented almost entirely inside a single C++ function. I also now regularly use old code as a kind of mental bookmark about things I've implemented previously. When I'm working on a solution to something I'll sometimes have deja-vu, and I'm glad I still have the old code.

pwpw 3y ago
I would love my own personal and local version of a code assistant like GitHub copilot trained entirely on my code. It would be interesting to see how it captures my style and how it would evolve over time. I regret deleting my code from my college courses. I’ve kept everything since then.

mikewarot 3y ago

If only there were a system that recorded hypertext, allowing you to both annotate it, and share with your friends (by generating a distributable copy on demand).[1] /s [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think

MalcolmWillis 3y ago

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