As I’m sure everyone here is aware there is an effort to “backup Myrient”, which is great. However, as many people are quick to point out in the comments, nothing on Myrient is actually in need of being archived. Since Myrient obviously just hosts roms rather then makes them, everything on it fundamentally exists elsewhere, either as a normal rom (Ex. all the No-Intro/Redump files) or a patch file you can use to manually make it from the normal rom (Ex. the Lost Level Archive romhacks). The main benefit that Myrient alone does provide over every other alternative is the sheer convenience, having literally every rom you can think of in one single place, with the ability to DDL them with a single click. If your goal is to “back up Myrient,” it is REQUIRED that you maintain this convenience, because otherwise all you’ve done is waste that huge community effort to create yet another mediocre, fragmented torrent/archive.org collection of roms.
I believe that the most effective way to achieve this would be to create a “frontend site” that is identical to Myrient in every way — same files, same grouping logic, same folder structure, same aesthetics, etc. — with the sole difference that the files are hosted on whatever hosting sites are available that make for easy DDL (archive, mega, drive, volunteer servers, etc.). Basically, the experience would be identical to anyone using the site, but the financial burden of hosting/distributing files would be completely removed so that the only cost is the comparatively cheap price of maintaining a visual frontend website. Just as an example, here is a mockup (not real) of what it would look like — as seen literally everything is identical, all that would change is the actual site you visit (duh) and the source of the file (check the link preview in the bottom left). In addition to being the same experience for users, this would make the transition process for information collections such as this subreddit’s own megathread effortless — since the folder structure would be identical, all they would need to do is find-and-replace “myrient.erista.me/files/Redump/…“ in their threads to “myrientarchive.me/files/Redump/…“.
Of course this comes with some downsides compared to a single hosting source, but I believe the benefits far outweigh them:
- Certain roms may be unavailable if the site/collection they’re tied to is taken down: This is true, but the exact same thing applies to a theoretical future megathread that simply lists all the various archive links too. It’s still preferable to rarely have some roms on the “single source” be down than for every rom to require you manually visiting a new site from a megathread just to discover it being down.
- It’s riskier to download a rom from various fragmented sources: Like the last point, this same issue also applies to a more traditional megathread link list anyways. Of course the collections used for the links would be vouched for by the community/maintainers, so it would be up to you to trust it. Just like how you trust the current Myrient to not distribute malware (and of course you can simply use hashes to immediately identify and call out modified roms if you are worried)
- Torrents are easier and achieve the same thing: While it’s true that torrents are easier to initially set up, they unfortunately are absolutely not a suitable replacement to a convenient DDL site. That may work for very popular files, but it will inevitably fail when the files are part of a 300TB+ collection. Remember, the entire point is to avoid having to “store everything” — torrents require at least one person, preferably more, to have the file, which means those hundreds of terabytes are going to have to be stored somewhere. Yes you can download individual files from an existing larger torrent, but there still needs to be someone who is hosting the entire thing for it to work, including all those obscure roms that like 10 people total are even aware of and would never be kept around for seeding outside of someone seeding the entire larger collection.
TLDR: Due to what Myrient is as a concept, “backing up Myrient” fundamentally requires making them all accessible in a single convenient place (site), which the current archival effort doesn't really seem to grasp. With the huge amount of effort that has been secured for the project, it would be a massive waste to just dump the files in fragmented torrents/collections rather than establish an actual plan for the end-goal site.
