Hi, I was wondering if it's possible to archive everything in this site. I realize the site itself is an archive, but sites go down, people pass away or lose interest, so it's better to have backups.

221701 files is a lot, so I'd be willing to reimburse you with Monero if you'd be willing to make a data dump or let me crawl the site or make a torrent or something similar.

I have stumbled upon this site a few times and have found stuff that's only hosted here. It's a great archive of internet culture and it would be a waste it if went away in 5, 10 or 100 years.

I suspect some data hoarders collaborated to back up swfchan's flashes at the end of last year, so if I get hit by a bus tomorrow those files should hopefully surface. I don't know for sure but there was a steep increase in traffic for many days, slowing the site a lot, which is why I suspect there was some kind of archiving effort of the archive before the deadline Adobe had set.

I've been thinking about making a torrent someday (using the most popular filenames and a meaningful folder structure), but that would probably be done after all the flashes from newgrounds.com have been added to the site. I'm putting that off into the future since there are many, many thousands of swf files pending and few people that browse here will want to watch them. Once the site's visitor count is truly abysmal and the creation of new flashes have all but dried up, that's when it would be optimal to make a torrent. Could throw in some metadata as well so it's a good idea to wait a while so people can tag as much as possible.

Because there is still flash being discovered daily i think it would make sense to split it up into multiple torrents so maybe what we have so far could be cut up into maybe 20 torrents as seeding and mirroring enormous collections would put a ton of strain on the ones hosting it and you would probably need to use multiple disk drives.

For comparison Flashpoints collection is 874GB swfchan would be way bigger and it would be good to get some seeders for the first parts whilst the next parts upload.

>>87886
All swf files currently in the archive only needs 664.5 GiB in total. The typical self-contained swf file meant to be published on the web is small. Especially on the old web. The 168k swfs from Newgrounds that I haven't added to swfchan yet would need an extra 356.1 GiB.

BlueMaxima's Flashpoint contains many flashes not on swfchan because crawling and archiving coffee-break flash game sites haven't been the focus for me. They also include games not made in flash, which could mean larger files. And games that depends on multiple external swfs can get large when combined. Flashes not self-contained aren't even supported by swfchan (unless the required files are downloaded separately and manually put in the correct folder hierarchy to be played offline).

You might be able to keep all that data on a hard disk but it's not doing much good there.
Unless you make use of the data
Swfchan has a ton of information on each item if we were to take this data it could be used by a computer program to estimate what the flash is and use that data to categorise them and this could be the basis of a flash search engine.

The next question is how to design the interface so you could casually specify what kind of flash you want to see and the computer finds what matches the description.

You can search this site already I was talking about the hypothetical swf wiki that tracks known flash torrents and the other sites that archive flash and possible ways to use the data to build a more comprehensive flash search engine