Something that came up in a chat today, somewhat of an existential thought / (threat?)
For a very long time, I’ve wanted to create a NAS, a large one, to house proper digital backups of my games (self-dump, and then verify with no-intro or redump, etc.) Having all that under one roof is an appealing thought, because no matter what, come hell or high water, my own personal collection is fine from whatever is happening in the outside world. But maybe more accurately, back in the day, it was a truly personal collection, because if you wanted a digital backup that was “known-good”, you had to do some legwork.
However, now that it’s 2023, and gigantic, full collections of no-intro and redump sets are just freely available for anyone on archive.org via a simple search, I find myself feeling not as in need of a NAS, because I can just go get something if I want it. I don’t necessarily have to keep 24TB of hard drive platters spinning, just so that copy of Goof Troop for the SNES is handy at all times.
But what happens if everyone just says "ah i’ll let that sit on someone else’s hard drive (the cloud), and then nobody’s keeping this stuff locally. (they most certainly are, but it’s mostly hypothetical, and those people tend to be in closed communities.)
I’m reminded of an episode of ‘Gilmore Girls’ where the entire town set up an all-day knitting marathon to raise money to fix a local bridge, everyone’s knitting, working, and then a rich guy comes down and just plunks down the remaining money needed to fix the bridge, and everyone having fun is just like “well, guess I’ll go home now…”
So some thoughts:
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Is the readily-available-ness of “roms” on archive.org actually hurting private preservation efforts?
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If archive.org decides to remove the public-facing aspect of these collections, is anyone harmed? Or will it make people who want to preserve games work harder to do so, and those who simply wish to pirate head back to shady sites?
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Hard to tell. With Private preservation there is a risk of things not being dumped and capture correctly. Also it does not allow the opportunity in the future for researched to study them, since it is private. Having a non-profit ensures the archive can live on and not end when that one individual stops for whatever reason. More importantly there is more to preservation then just dumping a game. With HitSave we are working with developers to back up the sources code along with interviews, design documents and other items that are not usually commercially available.
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Especially when it comes to preservation that is why decentralization is important. That is why we launched this site with Lemmy, at GitHub’s core is decentralization too. Don’t ever rely on one source.
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I’m all for having local copies of things I enjoy, even if it’s quickly available online. I don’t think it’s hurting preservation per se, instead it shows that there are many people involved in working on this, and if anyone wants to join the efforts they can do so. For your second question, no one would be directly harmed, but it would make things harder to acquire for anyone not part of communities where they are also shared. I really like the work that archive.org has done in the possibility to actually play games directly in the browser, instead of needing to download something, set up emulators, and configure settings. Making it easy for everyone to experience these games is really important.
TL;DR: If someone wants to help preservation at large, then private preservation with shared metadata/information is crucial. I don’t see that going away, even if archive.org would remove roms.
I think a decent amount of people do store ROMs locally still, but yeah I see your point about that not exactly being provable. Although ROMVault does have some sort of statistics thing (for missing ROMs at least), so maybe the author of that (GordonJ) has stats on how “well-collected” different ROM sets are.
