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🚨 It's time to fire up those seedboxes! Preserve human knowledge FOREVER by seeding Anna’s Archive torrents 🚨 (annas-archive.org)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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These are all the torrents currently managed and released by Anna’s Archive. For more information, see “Our projects” on the Datasets page. For Library Genesis and Sci-Hub torrents, the Libgen.li torrents page maintains an overview.

These torrents are not meant for downloading individual books. They are meant for long-term preservation.

Torrents with “aac” in the filename use the Anna’s Archive Containers format. Torrents that are crossed out have been superseded by newer torrents, for example because newer metadata has become available. Some torrents that have messages in their filename are “adopted torrents”, which is a perk of our top tier “Amazing Archivist” membership.

You can help out enormously by seeding torrents that are low on seeders. If everyone who reads this chips in, we can preserve these collections forever. This is the current breakdown:

Status	Torrents	Size	Seeders
🔴	54	154.0TB	<4
🟡	183	92.5TB	4–10
🟢	111	17.2TB	>10

IMPORTANT: If you seed large amounts of our collection (50TB or more), please contact us at [email protected] so we can let you know when we deprecate any large torrents.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

You're reciting their bullshit. I don't care about the size, what I care is that there's no documentation on the format they're using and nobody speaking about how to use those torrents.

Those guys made a lot with their website but that format is totally bullshit. If they truly cared about preservation they wouldn't be sharing obscure format s instead they would just provide a simple sharded backup of the metadata and files - meaning that anyone could pick one part and the contents would be the actual PDF/ePub files without any special encoding. This approach would've been better in multiple ways:

If most parts are lost the remaining would still be available and usable;
If the guys vanish from the surface of the planet anyone could easily pick up the available parts and build a new library from them;
Simple sharded backup means that people could use those torrents to download books as well, just add the torrent and pick the specific file to download. This would make the torrents way more likely to be shared and seeded as most people could afford to keeps parts or specific books they want and not an entire 300GB torrent. For what's worth individualism and selfishness always win in society, giving people a usable sharded backup would make it more likely to last.

What I see is the the guys running the website are just asking people to share HDD space to keep their database intact in case of legal trouble so they can rebuilt, but they choose to do it in a way that makes it really hard for others to replicate what they've build from their files effectively creating a monopoly on their stuff. Too bad this behavior just fucks up the community if they go away and can't / don't want to come back.

Edit: let me even got further on this. If they were actually interested in preservation they would just provide all their files as individual torrents/magnets people could use both for downloading and seeding long term. Then they could just provide a file with a list of all magnets or a zip of all torrent files in order to allow seeders to preserve large chunks of the database with minimal effort - import all torrents in folder and done.