Shit. Wait. So, y'all need to do actual replacement? I was lucky enough to lose my first Bay Area collection in like 05- when it was still only about 200gigs. Given the cost of a 1-2TB HD, I got two separate backup copies chillin in different places
Sorry, I wish I would have known that was what we were doing before. I was thinking a couple albums between individuals.
A DirectConnect (DC) hub would be an effective option, but then we are all going to have to continuously rely on our own bandwidth. ---I have been thinking about the shit for a while now, and every time, and outside of actually droppin some bread on server bandwidth, what we really need is a bot. However, Homeland Security already woke me up at 8am once (about a year or so after I lost the drive, lol....great story), and I don't feel like tempting fate again.
I haven't worked out all the details yet, but I think we should try to see if we can patch together a mesh of free cloud hosting/file sharing services.
https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-cloud-storage
https://uk.pcmag.com/file-syncing-and-b ... g-services
https://www.cloudwards.net/best-cloud-storage/
While I was compiling a list of the most attractive options, I bumped into an open source class with the same google search
https://www.fossmint.com/open-source-cl ... platforms/
As I was glancing through what these were about, part of the services reminded me a lot of the Cyberduck/Mountain duck project
https://cyberduck.io Cyberduck is a browser and Mountain duck mounts it as a folder. The function in a similar manner, but with greater functionality than I recall Expandrive used to have (but that was hella years ago). Cyber and Mountain should have login procedure templetes we could craft for the services we are familiar with (Mega and Mediafire seem like they will work well for this), but I have never actually tried it.
Alternatively, there are
https://www.airexplorer.net/en/ and/or
https://www.airlivedrive.com/en/clouds/ which could drop us into them without much customization.
If you check out nothing else, peep my new fkin favorite place on earth
https://letsupload.co/upgrade.html
scnlog switched their multi/mirror option to this thing called Mirrorace, and this immediately became the most attractive option every time. Letsupload also has a WebDav option, so we can move files to a service with incredibly fast transfer speeds, no captia/auth, and virtually 0 wait time (even without paying for the upgrade)
It looks like both the duck and air options will allow us to push files between the clouds - so shit only ever has to get uploaded 1 time.
We just have to all go around to [current target list stands at] letsupload, mega, box, pcloud, mediafire, potentially ADrive. Also, Nextcloud looks like it may be interesting. It may eventually be useful to all operate within a collaborative space.
We just have to make sure that whichever piece of software we all land on using to interact with the clouds, that they are setup to initiate encryption as they upload. Always make the first landing spot a secure cloud, and probably stick to the 256AES/"0 knowledge encryption" (i.e. I encrypt it during upload, and you apply the key during download; at no point will anyone but us know this is copyrighted material). I will make sure the software we use handles it for us, so this shouldn't be a problem, but, you know...don't get caught slippin.
This sounds much more complicated than it really is; it is just the legal (methods, not material) equivalent of the game I used to play propagating albums across my xdcc bots with Flashfxp. Plus, if we are all sharing accounts and using a drive mounter or software browser, it is literally just dragging a parent folder from one drive to another.
I have not been an active collector for probably 10 years and never grabbed anything but bay shit except when I was runnin that IRC channel with Crestside- but it is still a little north of 600gb.
Mull it over.
I will dig out a catalog maker and compile one for what I have on this drive (I know for a fact I have that V-White album, and at least 2 others in the request section, but they are not showing up on this drive. One of the other one's must have a little more) and you can see if there is enough there you want to make this worth the investment of time and effort.
TBH, I kinda just want to see if it will work.
Also, if anyone reading this wants an @townbidness.com email address, shoot me a pm with a name and pass.