Is there a plan to preserve this forum's data when it shuts down?

[Old_Dick]

I copy and paste technical threads that find useful in to a file, sort of a cheat sheet. I have many from Doremus and others, thanks. I periodically tar them up and email them to myself as a backup. If anyone is using Unix/Linux, here is the command. tar --no-recursion --exclude='ALL.TAR.bz2' -cvjf ALL.TAR.bz2 ./*

[Corran]

Rick, Randy, you're right. I was being a little too hasty. There's also a big difference in demographic though between the members here and the film enthusiasts I interact with personally on a day-to-day basis, and at least from my perspective here, they don't give a hoot about this forum or the information it contains. They'd rather ask the professor or me or someone on Facebook. But then here I could start rambling about education, politics, and those young whippersnappers and such but I will spare everyone .

[Dan Fromm]

In the long run we are all dead. And in the long run everything on the Internet will be forgotten.

If not forgotten, so hard to find as to be, practically speaking, non-existent. We can rage against the fading of the light but that won't light candles.

More seriously, posts on this forum and articles on the site contain a mixture of information that's safe to act on, non-information that informs no decisions or actions, and misinformation that isn't safe to act on. I don't think that any of us knows enough to curate it.

What we should do is accept reality and stop asking other people to fix it. If you (singular, but directed at more than one person) don't like reality you'll have to try to fix it yourself (singular again but directed at more than one person).

Re fixing our little reality, sorry, collection of knowledge, that's why I compiled my list of references and made sure that all of them are archived. That's why I make sure that references in my cookbook -- I'm still working on it, still adding references -- that can be archived are archived. Don't gripe, light a candle.

[Michael R]

Well said.

[analoguey]

A personal archive sounds good. Ralph, which type of archiving were you referring to when you said it will tax the system? A personal archive, building up over a month or so should be fine isn't it?
(I used to mostly redirect the threads I liked, learned from into my email, but lately have had too many threads to search well enough on Email compared to the forum itself.

[sepiareverb]

maybe someone should think about writing a book to preserve the useful information. a book might have a higher survival rate than the internet. there is a lot on almost every internet forum/blog that is just chatter and maybe not worth preserving even today.

Been done.

[invisibleflash]

I worry about digital extinction by loss of funding and closed websites.

Over time we, meaning all of us, have lost a lot of data, meaning writings, images, movies, libraries, you name it from failure to plan for extinction of resources.

This forum contains more info/data than any other source I know about LF photography.

How do we preserve it?

Have we forgotten the Alexandria Library fire?

It seems we are doomed to repeat the past.

Great point!

A lot of stuff disappears overnight on the web. Get to work archiving it.

I was looking for Gandolfi's site a while back and it disappeared. Some of his work is archived as early year archives here

http://web.archive.org/

type in

http://www.emilschildt.com/

His sites archives are in the early section before the Asians took it over.

Some of Gandolfi's work is archived on Tumblr

https://www.tumblr.com/search/Emil+Schildt

This underscores the important of spreading work across broad areas of the net for free...it helps to archive it.

Sad, but Tumblr changed and cut the search results once Yahoo took it over. Gandolfi does have some books on Blurb, so glad he did archive on paper.

[Ralph Barker]

A personal archive sounds good. Ralph, which type of archiving were you referring to when you said it will tax the system? A personal archive, building up over a month or so should be fine isn't it?
(I used to mostly redirect the threads I liked, learned from into my email, but lately have had too many threads to search well enough on Email compared to the forum itself.

My concern about system load was prompted by the idea of a few thousand users deciding to use some sort of "site sucker" application at the same time. Although I'm not actually familiar with any such apps, any sort of mass data dump while the forum is active would likely cause issues, particularly if multiple people happened to be doing it at the same time.

[Tin Can]

Been done.

Not quite done, that's a mock up.

Library of Congress is big, but big enough?

Are we in there...

Started with 6000+ books from Thomas Jefferson after the last library was burned.

https://www.loc.gov/about/history-of-the-library/

[BrianShaw]

LoC might microfilm it... or digitize the paper-version of the site.