A reminder about filesharing sites

[Matt_H]

As the arrest of a former Amigan and closure of Megaupload remind us, these filesharing sites are incredibly volatile and unsafe for permanent archiving. If you need to distribute (legit) Amiga stuff, put it on Aminet for posterity.

[Matt_H]

Personally, I see software piracy as a marketing/sales problem: instead of asking "How can we get them to stop stealing our stuff?" they should be asking "How can we get them to buy our stuff?"

Point being, this kind of thing is going to happen - these sites are going to come down, be it for legal, business, or hackery reasons. They are not safe for long-term use. Read up about The Archive Team to learn about the importance of institutionalized backups and archiving, and the danger of "the Cloud".

I've seen users here at Amiga.org post files to Megaupload and similar sites: programs they've written, scripts they've created, images they've made, formerly commercial software reclassified as freeware, document scans. All that stuff is lost now. Aminet is our best repository for preserving Amiga goodies.

[Matt_H]

Aminet Forever!!!

But God help u if u try to upload a 1GB game

Does Aminet have capacity issues like that? (Is it slow? Or not possible?) Definitely something worth discussing (and resolving) to make it a more attractive archival repository.

[Matt_H]

No. For anything (significantly) bigger than 100 MB we'd like to get a short notice upfront, but there are no actual problems hosting big files.

Good to know!

[Matt_H]

Personally, I see software piracy as a marketing/sales problem: instead of asking "How can we get them to stop stealing our stuff?" they should be asking "How can we get them to buy our stuff?"

Point being, this kind of thing is going to happen - these sites are going to come down, be it for legal, business, or hackery reasons. They are not safe for long-term use. Read up about The Archive Team to learn about the importance of institutionalized backups and archiving, and the danger of "the Cloud".

I've seen users here at Amiga.org post files to Megaupload and similar sites: programs they've written, scripts they've created, images they've made, formerly commercial software reclassified as freeware, document scans. All that stuff is lost now. Aminet is our best repository for preserving Amiga goodies.

And that's why you don't use cloud storage for archiving.