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Time to rebuild a library
My 5 terabyte harddrive went poof this morning, and silly me hadn't bought data-recovery insurance. Fortunately, I still have other copies of all my important data, and it'll just take a while to download everything else I'd been collecting.
Which brings up the question: What info do you feel it's important to have offline copies of, gathered from the whole gosh-dang internet? A recent copy of Wikipedia and the Project Gutenberg DVD are the obvious starting places... which other info do you think pays the rent of its storage space?
Depends how much storage space you are willing to buy.
One of my fantasies is a Raspberry Pi that automatically downloads all Wikipedia updates each month or so, to keep a local copy. The ultimate version of this would do the same for every new academic article available on Sci-Hub.
Sci-Hub is the largest collection of scientific papers on the planet, and has over 58 million academic papers. If they average 100 kB a piece, that's only 5.8 TB. If they average 1MB each, then you would need to shell out some decent cash, but you could in theory download all ava... (read more)