Creating a software archive: Which file hosting service is best? - Macintosh Garden

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2014, February 6 - 9:57pm

#1

shiroishimatora's picture

shiroishimatora

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Creating a software archive: Which file hosting service is best?

Hey all, I've been lurking around the Garden for over a year now and I want to contribute back to the retro Mac community. I've been building my personal archive of classic Mac apps and OSes off of the Garden, Max1zzz's wonderful server, and various other sites and some physical disks.

I've noticed that lately, some links have either been removed, are dead, or are on a file host or server that is slow/unreliable. I've also noticed that some other files are nearly impossible to find on the internet, even on illegal sites.

My goal is to keep old software available in multiple locations to ensure its availability. One reason why I'm doing this is the near complete unavailability of the original and certain machine-specific Mac OS 9 installer discs on the Garden because of MediaFire removing them.

As of right now, I do not have an ETA as to when it will be online. I'm currently prepping files within SheepShaver for safe transport/storage and organizing them by category.

Now to my question for the Garden community: which hosting sites are best? I intend to use 2-3 and pay for extra storage. Box, Google Drive, Mega, Dropbox, and CloudMe look like good options. I need a service that doesn't limit the number of single file downloads per time period or a service that has a high single file bandwidth limit per time period. Max file size isn't much of a concern.

As for my G4 server, I'm open to suggestions on how to run it, but I have a fairly good idea of how to get it up and running. It'll be either a QuickSilver 2002 800 MHz uniprocessor unit or a 1.42 GHz uniprocessor FW800 MDD G4 (depends on if the FW800 model is truly dead or just has bad RAM).

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2014, February 6 - 11:09pm

#2

Gary

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Joined: 2011 Jul 21

From strictly a "User's" perspective, I like the interface presented by Mega. It's clean, simple and fast.

But given the history of Megaupload and its ties to Mega, I have to remain skeptical about its longevity.

I suspect that the final solution to the server problem (at least for MG) will be what is already happening: Semi-Private Servers hosted by MG members.

Gary

2014, February 6 - 11:55pm

(Reply to #2) #3

shiroishimatora's picture

shiroishimatora

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MEGA also isn't very friendly with some browsers. It's not even fully compatible with Safari 7.

2014, February 6 - 11:56pm

#4

max1zzz

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Joined: 2010 Oct 3

None of them are very reliable, so be prepared to loose everything with no warning if you use a cloud hosting (my mediafire account was dropped with no warning whatsoever, despite their claims i repeatedly ignored copyright warnings, of which i never revived any)

The best option is private servers (which if i understand the last bit of your post correctly
you intend on doing?)
On the subject of G4 servers, i never had any luck using my quicksilver (granted it is a 2001 not a 2002 one) for some reason it was never stable as a server (despite the fact it works 100% fine as a normal desktop) I don't know how well a MDD will do as i have never had one
I would pickup a cheap Sawtooth G4, my server ran on one back in it's early days and it was the second most stable machine i ever used for a server

However the hands down best G4 for a server is a Xserve G4 (for obvious reasons )if you can get one, mine is by far the most stable computer i have ever had, it has never crashed in the just over a year it ran solidly

2014, February 7 - 12:51am

(Reply to #4) #5

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shiroishimatora

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I'm not going to depend solely on file hosting, I'll just be using them as mirrors/quickly linkable files (in addition to my offline archive mirror).

Yes, I intend to make a private server similar to yours, but the archive will be a little more diverse (I intend on uploading old Apple keynotes and OS X disk images, among other things).

I haven't had any problems with my QS 2002 after I replaced the PSU (it was dead on arrival) and figured out I had a faulty stick of SDRAM. And I have a Yikes! G4, but I think I'll stick with a Leopard-capable machine (unless the QS really has a problem with cooling and MDD is dead).

And yes, I would love to have an Xserve. G4, G5, and early Intel ones pop up on Craigslist in my area from time to time, but I always seem to just miss them.

And I could use a few tips on getting external access to the server up and running in the future, if you'd be willing to help.

2014, February 7 - 1:35am

#6

max1zzz

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Sure thing, just post on here or send me a email whenever you need help

The QS will probably be fine, just i could never get mine to work as a server
Oh and i'll give you one important bit of advise now - Keep really good backups, Hdd's have a habit of failing at the worst times, my server runs a backup every 12 hours now

2014, February 9 - 3:20am

(Reply to #6) #7

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shiroishimatora

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Thanks.

And I'm exploring MacZFS for file storage. Since files with resource forks will be Stuffed and BinHex'd, it shouldn't be a problem. And since MacZFS is based on the implementation of ZFS Apple was working on for Snow Leopard, it's pretty Mac-friendly. Of course, there will still be offline backups.

2014, February 9 - 3:22am

#8

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shiroishimatora

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First update: the FW800 G4 is indeed dead. Or at least, it will be unusable in the near future. Beeps once without RAM, silent with good RAM, beeps three times with bad RAM. The QS 2002 on the other hand is working just fine.

2014, February 9 - 11:35pm

#9

max1zzz

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What advantage dose using zfs have over using single drives formatted as HFS plus?
if i rember correctly zfs is normally used in raid arrays, and personally i would avoid raid if at all possible (well, using spanned sets is ok imo as long as it is backed up, but mirrored sets don't have any advantage over just backing up the way i see it)

2014, February 10 - 12:18am

(Reply to #9) #10

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shiroishimatora

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Protection against silent data corruption. ZFS checksums every read and write on the filesystem and automatically repairs any bad blocks. It also has filesystem snapshot support, deduplication, compression, extremely large file and volume size support, and a built-in logical volume manager.
ZFS does support software RAIDs, but it is not mandatory.
I agree, mirrored sets are useless. But ZFS supports a version of RAID that is actually useful, RAID-Z. It's similar to RAID5 (block-level striping with distributed parity), but without the silent write corruption.

Also, it seems that the FW800 G4 isn't dead after all. The video card is faulty and the system hangs at boot trying to initialize it.

2014, March 6 - 8:48pm

#11

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shiroishimatora

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Update - 03/06/2014

No progress as far as getting the archive online. I need to purchase a domain (which isn't a problem) and get port forwarding and/or DynDNS working (which is a problem, I have Comcast).

I've settled on using the FW800 G4 with Leopard Server as a host for now. I'll set Time Machine to backup every 15-30 minutes as well.