Is it possible to get a current snapshot of the ifarchive? It is impossible to get in touch with the maintainers, though they list that you can contact them if you are interested in a copy. Does anyone know about this?
How did you try to contact them? At least one of the maintainers posts regularly on RAIF, maybe start a thread there?
I read here as well.
My email records show nobody asking about an archive snapshot for the past several months. When did you email? What address?
The answer is, roughly, that if you want a one-off copy, you should use a web-downloading tool (like wget) – just limit the download speed so that you don’t block out other users. And only download the directories you really need. Consider using a mirror near you rather than the main site.
If you want to stay synced with the archive forever, we prefer that you become a public mirror yourself – that helps spread the load around. In that case, we can give you rsync access.
I read here as well, FWIW.
(Yes, yes, I’m far behind the times.)
Any recommendations as to the prefered download rate to limit it to, and/or wait periods between files for both main site and any mirrors?
Tommie
Actually you don’t need a web download tool, since many mirrors allow FTP access. That means you can copy the “ifarchive” directory directly (pretty much like a normal directory on your disk.)
I recommend ftp://ftp.giga.or.at/pub since in Europe bandwidth in not a big concern.
You can use FileZilla if you’re on Windows. On Linux and Mac OS X, simply open the above address in your file manager and copy the “ifarchive” directory.
I’m going to arbitrarily say that if you are trawling Archive directories and downloading lots of files, limit your transfer speed to 100 kilobytes/sec. Again, that’s for a one-time download.