Bill Schindler

State of the Archives

I'm occasionally asked about the missing parts of the archives. Where are they? Are they lost?

The bad news

The bad news is that the archives are not currently available on the Web.

The problem is that the archives take up space. Lots of space. A few years ago, the archives had reached 100 megabytes and that wasn't all of the messages. Since our Web hosting company felt I should pay for additional disk space, getting the archives on-line at the time started looking expensive. (This is a volunteer effort, folks. That money comes out of me, personally.)

There was no space left for indexing (so people could do searches), or adding any features, files, or even editing pages on the root site (that's the Bit Ranch).

The good news

I have every single message stored in a database and two back-ups. About 400 megabytes -- 30,000 to 40,000 messages.

I'm a partner in Abiliba Network Services which provides hosting services of its own. We happen to have our own servers with gigabytes of disk space and huge pipelines.

So, after some discussion with my partner, we agreed that it's okay to move some of our personal projects onto the server. And that's what's happening, but very slowly. (See “volunteer project” above?)

What's happening now

All of the messages are stored in a database on the list server. The list server is a different machine from the Web server — it's about 1,200 miles away and behind a firewall.

The process of making the archives available requires copying that database over the the Web server. Messages need to be cleaned up. Duplicates need to be removed. Wonky formatting fixed. It's slow because I do it my spare time. It's also slow because I'm taking the time to clean up messages before they go into the archives.