Peel Archive

[Gary]

A few thoughts on creating a Peel archive (without any money)

Aim.
I personal would like to see an archive to be a permanently 
available legacy to John's work. 
There are an awful lot of people with tapes of either session's or 
complete programs therefore the archive must have the ability for 
these people to contribute to it, making it more than the collection 
of one individual, and thus the capacity for growth.

The obvious answer would be an FTP server with upload capability. 
Unfortunately this idea suffers from two major problems. 
1) If the server dies or is offline then the complete archive goes 
with it. 
2) Storage and bandwidth. The reason I had the kill the Cats Caravan 
Festive Fifty Archive site was due to the sheer volume of traffic 
the site experienced. The site regularly went over the 45 GB per 
month traffic limit, thus taking the site offline. At that time my 
archive took around 70 GB of storage. As you can imagine the cost of 
lets say 100 GB of server space at that level of traffic does not 
come cheap. (One quote was for £750 a month). I tried setting up an 
FTP sever on my ADSL connection as a last attempt but this just 
max'ed the upload constantly, thus making the possibility of 
obtaining any complete file remote.

There seems to be a few people at the moment wanting to go down the 
newsgroup route. The newsgroups are probably the fastest way of 
obtaining files (once you've sussed out how to up and download). My 
main objection to this route is simply one of permanence. The best 
news servers have retention figures of only 90 or so days. I 
personal do not want any archive created to be a `get it now, or 
it's gone' solution. If I were to upload my entire archive to the 
best news server, I would probably just about get to the end when 
the first posts were starting to be deleted. This would result in a 
few people with complete archives but nothing left for any 
newcomers, (unless the files were constantly reposted, again and 
again – something only conceivable if you have a very fat pipe with 
no bandwidth restrictions and don't use that connection for much 
else.

That only leaves, as far as I can see the P2P file sharing networks. 
When I off-lined the FF archive site I moved the complete archive 
over to the edoneky network  because that's the file sharing 
software I was using at the time. Any multi node P2P network will 
do. There does seem to be a lot of Peel related session material on 
that network, but I suppose it's the same for other networks. I do 
know that files I released on that network 3 years ago are still 
available for download even though I stopped sharing them personal a 
long time ago. This therefore meets some of the aims.


Apologies for the long post but this is important. 
Please post thoughts.

Gary.