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Comment by KomoD | Hacker News Reader

> What if the developer published the data to a torrent on a monthly or other periodic basis? While not completely legal, it would enable their legacy to live on indefinitely and ensure future access to a lot of information

No, it isn't a solution in my opinion, torrents need to be seeded, (at least) initially by Archive.Today, seeding a shit load of multi terabyte torrents is a lot of bandwidth which will probably up costs

Torrents die, and I would especially expect massive torrents like that to die out fast, there's not a lot of people who can spare that much storage and/or bandwidth, it's not just "go buy a few drives, put in and seed", especially not for that duration of time.

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I download and upload more than 50TB per month, every month, just for my personal stuff.

Bandwidth is dirt cheap these days.

> Bandwidth is dirt cheap these days

Not at scale. 50TB per month is nothing. That’s 151mbps. Most transit providers will be okay with a 10% commitment, so this is a gigabit port which is like $60-300/mo.

Assuming 50 people would download the 1PB archive from the provider, that would require at least 151gbps of bandwidth, rounded up to 200gbps, at the cheapest transit provider (HE) this is still at least $12k/mo for transit alone.

Is that dirt-cheap for a non-profit? I’m not sure.

Torrents make distribution even more dirt cheap. See sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37028576

In theory yes, but we’re talking about such a massive dataset that archive themselves would have to seed it forever anyway. But yes, in theory, if there would be a lot of seeders for it, this would be a non-issue, however I highly doubt that there are enough people interested in seeding a petabyte worth of archives. It’s certainly less than people who are willing and able to keep a local copy.

And if you did that with a consumer ISP, they would terminate you as a customer very quickly. At which point you’ll have to pay cloud provider for traffic, or a T1 network for IP transit (alongside colocation fees and actually putting a server in a datacenter and all that).

I'm already doing more than 1.5PB/mo, and my ISP doesn't care. I also don't think they'd care if I did 10PB a month, in fact they want to sell me 5Gigabit internet which could do 50PB/mo.

I also have several other unmetered gigabit links. The bandwidth is out there.

This is definitely an exception, not the norm.

> At which point you’ll have to pay cloud provider for traffic, or a T1 network for IP transit (alongside colocation fees and actually putting a server in a datacenter and all that).

And there's an issue when you consider not all content in the archive is legal (both in terms of copyright and other types of illegal), cloud providers, a lot of other hosts will probably kick you off.

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