For some years now, I’ve been interested in IF from the perspective of games as cultural artifacts. In my reading, there seems the strong indication that many games are lost to future generations due to link rot. Is there a need for concerned IF citizens to support archival efforts? I have unlimited online storage with link sharing availability.
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The IF Archive has been running since before HTML was invented. I am fairly confident in saying it will keep going.
Getting people to upload their games to the IF Archive is a social problem. (Also a technological problem, for games that have server-side components. But the majority of IF doesn’t.) It varies a lot between communities.
(We would like contributions to be voluntary; we’ve tried to get away from the idea of vacuuming up other people’s games.)
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Thank you. That is good news about the archive.
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The IFDB also tends to have download links rather than website links. I’m not sure if those can rot, too.
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Those are IF Archive links; IFDB doesn’t host games itself.
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Generally I have no “social” (whatever this mean) problems in uploading to the IF archive.
but personally, considering the current state of US and its 'net policy, I suspect that can be wise setting up a mirror in some EU country/ies…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
fair point to consider
Should anyone be minded to do so, instructions are here. (See also the previous thread on that topic.)
(I think it’s probably getting more towards 40Gbyte than the 32Gbyte quoted on that page a year ago.)
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Okay, I installed rsync, created a folder called If Archive under my master games folder, and cd into the folder… just copying the line from that link(thinking initially it was a full rsync command) gives me a no such file error prefixing it with rsync treating the rsync in the copied line like the file:// in a URL for a local file or the http:// in the URL for a web page results in printing what looks like an ls -l without downloading anything… piping rsync --help into nano isn’t clearing things up…
so, how do I actually use the provided link and rsync to create a local copy of the IF Archive?
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Same question as Jeffery asked. Also, if there any way to download the archive onto Windows in a non-command-line manner?
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You’d use something like the following command line:
rsync -aP rsync://rsync.ifarchive.org/if-archive/ if-archive/
This downloads the entire IF Archive into a new directory if-archive under the current working directory. (The trailing slashes are significant; rsync’s command-line syntax is a bit fiddly.)
The cluster of options (-aP) are to preserve things like timestamps (-a) and to both keep partial files (if interrupted in the middle of a big file) and provide a progress indication (-P – note upper-case letter). (You could read the documentation and adjust these options to taste.)
If repeated later (from the same working directory), or after interrupting the first go, it’ll just fetch what’s changed / what it doesn’t already have.
rsync is the access method that’s provided for this purpose (so it’s probably a good idea to use it, so as not to ‘thrash the server’), but that doesn’t mean you’re obliged to use the rsync command-line tool.
There do appear to be more graphical rsync clients out there, on a quick look (but I haven’t tried any of them, so I can’t recommend a particular one).
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While the culture for competitions like IFComp is for all the entries to be archived, for some Itch competitions it’s not part of the culture, and authors have sometimes been quite opposed to suggestions that their entries be archived. This mismatch between expectations and suspicion of the Archive is the social problem.
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It’s interesting. I support the notion of respecting some IF authors to not have certain works archived. But it’s an option traditionally published author don’t enjoy: “I know longer want this particular book to be available…” Too late, it’s in the wild.
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You mean, that issue of I-0 again ???
Perplexed regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
I’ve successfully rsync-downloaded 38.6 Gb, and maybe that’s about all of the IF archive: however, I’m hitting this error:
rsync: opendir "lost+found" (in if-archive) failed: Permission denied (13)
lost+found/
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1637) [generator=3.1.1]
Oops, that’s a bit unfortunate. You’re not missing anything by not getting that directory; that’s an internal detail of the filesystem with no external significance.
(However, I don’t know off-hand whether rsync will have fetched more stuff after encountering that error, or stopped there.)
Seems to have stopped there. I figure I captured the vast majority.
Sorry about that.
I’ve added the line
exclude = lost+found/***
…to the rsyncd.conf file. That should prevent the error. I hope… Let me know if it works.
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Retried rsync and got the following, so it did make some difference. Thanks Zarf!
receiving incremental file list
./
games/hugo/Index
8,945 100% 8.53MB/s 0:00:00 (xfr#1, ir-chk=1277/19483)
magazines/SPAG/