It isn't actually ethical to steal whatever you want during a war and then do whatever your want with it though? Like I don't think this is a great metaphor anyway, but that's not actually something I approve of either? The evacuation of the Louvre was not actually random passers-by emailing things to the British Museum as anonymous donations. And if the book you stole was full of Resistance codephrases and the place you dropped it off was not as safe as you thought - well actually you should have maybe let it burn.
But if you want to carefully put LJ on physical media and pack it in crates in underground bunkers until things settle down and you have a chance to carefully research who should have possession of it afterward, that I am 100% for.
My issues with wayback are mainly a) it's public, so you're not just tucking it away just in case, you're reposting it for everybody to see in a way the original creators may not have wanted and that makes it harder to give feedback etc; b) it's not actually all that safe! As I mentioned in my first post, Wayback has in the past changed its policies so that huge swathes of stuff just disappeared - for a few years you had to go to the bibalex mirror in Alexandria to find anything because Wayback itself was nearly empty (until the revolution in Egypt and the bibalex site stopped being reliable too! War!) There's no reason to think that won't happen again; and c) most of the people saving stuff to wayback aren't actually checking to see if the owners do have backups somewhere else, possibly safer than wayback. Very often they do, or are working on one! In those cases throwing up wayback links isn't actually doing anything other than confusing people and annoying the creators.
Like I said, if something is seriously endangered, the people who created it can't be contacted, there are no other backups, and it has real value to posterity, I do think wayback is a good option. For a lot of lj content right now, that's probably true. But it shouldn't be a preferred option or a default option. And if you really think it's valuable cultural patrimony that should be saved at all costs, you should be downloading locally and looking into those archival CDs, because the 'cloud' is just storing stuff on hard drives you don't control.
And "it's a war" is definitely not a reason to not think about questions like that. "Saving" things poorly just leads to stuff disappearing even more completely. (Because another reason I want to be cautious with Wayback is that I think it *is* a vital service, and the more people abuse it, the more people are going to deliberately block wayback from having their stuff, so that when the emergency really does happen the option won't be there.)
no subject
But if you want to carefully put LJ on physical media and pack it in crates in underground bunkers until things settle down and you have a chance to carefully research who should have possession of it afterward, that I am 100% for.
My issues with wayback are mainly a) it's public, so you're not just tucking it away just in case, you're reposting it for everybody to see in a way the original creators may not have wanted and that makes it harder to give feedback etc; b) it's not actually all that safe! As I mentioned in my first post, Wayback has in the past changed its policies so that huge swathes of stuff just disappeared - for a few years you had to go to the bibalex mirror in Alexandria to find anything because Wayback itself was nearly empty (until the revolution in Egypt and the bibalex site stopped being reliable too! War!) There's no reason to think that won't happen again; and c) most of the people saving stuff to wayback aren't actually checking to see if the owners do have backups somewhere else, possibly safer than wayback. Very often they do, or are working on one! In those cases throwing up wayback links isn't actually doing anything other than confusing people and annoying the creators.
Like I said, if something is seriously endangered, the people who created it can't be contacted, there are no other backups, and it has real value to posterity, I do think wayback is a good option. For a lot of lj content right now, that's probably true. But it shouldn't be a preferred option or a default option. And if you really think it's valuable cultural patrimony that should be saved at all costs, you should be downloading locally and looking into those archival CDs, because the 'cloud' is just storing stuff on hard drives you don't control.
And "it's a war" is definitely not a reason to not think about questions like that. "Saving" things poorly just leads to stuff disappearing even more completely. (Because another reason I want to be cautious with Wayback is that I think it *is* a vital service, and the more people abuse it, the more people are going to deliberately block wayback from having their stuff, so that when the emergency really does happen the option won't be there.)