On 22/03/2021 01:28, Bald Eagle wrote:

> include attachments in ANY of the newsgroups.

Try it now :>)


> backed that up and created a PDF and a zip file of all of his sources. I 
> have all of Friedrich Lohmueller's excellent work as well.
> Perhaps we could have some dedicated space on the new server for that 
> material,

I'm happy to re-host that and other related resources provided that 
copyright / license issues don't get in the way.

> and maybe mull over a mechanism by which the core POV-Ray 
> material (source, binaries, documentation) could have backups hosted on 
> one or more other sites.

archive.org kind of does this for the www site in an informal way. That 
said though we always designed the site such that everything important 
sits in our FTP directories. For example, ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/ and 
below contains binaries going back to version 1.0. The same physical 
directory tree is mapped to the WWW site as http://www.povray.org/ftp/, 
and this is where downloads get pulled from when initiated from the www.

The reason for doing it this way is that in the past (much less so now, 
though) it was common for FTP sites to be mirrored in various places 
around the world (less as a means of backup than as a speedup for local 
users as international bandwidth wasn't what it is now, and also as a 
means of offloading traffic from a main site).

We used to list the formal mirrors (those we had arrangements with) on 
our download page but don't anymore as they tend to come and go more 
than they used to. You also could find mirrors via the Archie search 
engine but I don't think that's really a thing anymore.

That said there are still mirrors out there, e.g. 
https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.povray.org. I'm sure there's 
more but since FTP sites themselves aren't as far as I am aware directly 
indexed by web search engines they will only turn up in searches if the 
FTP site also has a HTTP front-end.


> is not free - Perhaps there is something some of us could do by check, 
> paypal, patreon, ....?

Appreciate the thought, but not needed at this point.

-- Chris

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