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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

In the olden days you’d find someone to donate you a server and have a few volunteers around the world mirror it.

It still happens. You need storage a TB or two with unlimited (or at least very high) traffic? That's not an issue. Even I could help being a mirror from home. But I wouldn't be surprised if there would be some free tiers already from cloud provider.

Half PB is a bit more than that, and I guess it is expected to grow... in 2023 it is not realistic to throw such storage around for free (+mirrors). It will be realistic in a few years considering that the storage prices have been in free fall for the past 30 years, but that time hasn't came yet.

(As a maybe interesting comparison, Debian's mirror is around half TB: https://people.debian.org/~koster/www/mirror/size )

The falling cost of storage is at least partly the reason hosting a few thousand packages takes up hundreds of TB. "Storage is practically free" from the perspective of each of those projects. By the time .5 PB is a trivial cost, they'll need 50 PB.

Yeah, that too.

Yeah NixOS has done some technical choices to require tons of data downloads, even if there is little modification of the content of the packages. Regularly my computer has 10 Gb worth of downloads because some high level package got upgraded and even if it's dynamically linked, the lower level packages still get re-downloaded from cache.nixos.org. It doesn't matter because storage is free right?

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