Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
Yes, "all the mirrors in the world" included Amazon. No reply from them either and I'm not going to write companies who don't have a mirroring program/an explicit interest in the offer. It's appreciated if others do, though.
Yeah, 34 TB is still a lot of data, unfortunately. I think most people reading this list recognize and appreciate this. (I actually have a draft e-mail about Dispenser requesting 24 TB just a few weeks ago....)
I'd personally like to see a price breakdown for this project. Doing a bit of quick research, it sounds like storage alone would probably cost maybe $4,000 USD, but it depends whether you're buying individual 2 TB drives or you're buying larger 20 TB drives. More than this, though, is the ongoing and recurring costs assuming you want to keep this data online. Is having this (backup) data be available online an explicit goal here? Or is the primary goal simply to have an offline backup of this data?
In either case (online or offline), a price breakdown would help nearly any volunteer organization (such as a Wikimedia chapter) decide whether to help in this effort. Crowd-sourcing the funding for this project is also a possibility, either via individual donations (Kickstarter, perhaps) or via small grants from various Internet-related or free content-related organizations (EFF, Mozilla, Wikimedia, et al.).
Soliciting money for this project requires a much clearer, detailed plan. The current shoe-string strategy of everyone downloading a piece of the 34 TB is certainly romantic, but it also seems to be impractical and silly.
MZMcBride