Log inThe July 2025 Update - 10 Years of Archiving!
This is officially our 10 years of being public, thanks to the support of thousands of people like you over the years.
TL:DR - Archiving is expensive, donations welcome. We've got a clear path forward, and are continuing to collect more pony data as we can.
The Bad:
Since I opened up ways to support the archive, I always set the goals around 50% of the running costs. This is now biting at my wallet, as it costs around $1400 a month to run as of June 2025 at our levels and replication. I've been putting 500-700 a month into TPA, for a while now. While this is offset by some one-time donations, it's still a considerable amount.
While 2024 was tremendously bad, 2025 has been OK. I'm still paying off debt from replacing damaged or failed equipment. Debt worries me, but doesn't affect TPAs data, which is what you're here for.
I'd like to focus on my future, and less on debt. I've adjusted the goals on SubscribeStar to reflect the actual costs. As always, anything is appreciated but I'll run this as far as I can. For a sustainable future, cost reduction has been a major focus.
The Neutral:
We have air conditioning in the server farm now. It unfortunately costs money to run. Rebuilding, refurbishing, and purchasing new hardware due to heat related damage, costs more. The servers use less electricity, make less noise, will last longer, and be more reliable now.
Rebuilding systems and arrays is stressful for everypony. Hopefully this puts a bit of preventative maintenance on that.
The Good:
We migrated servers - Newer hardware, faster load times, much reduced power usage, reduced infrastructure complexity. Moved systems from Dual Xeon E5-2690v4 to a single Ryzen 9 9950x.
Sorted archive - I sorted it. Deduped ~15TB, removed 22TB of outdated backups, and non pony.
Tape Backup - We have LTO8 tape backups now for TPA. 4 initial copies will be made and delivered to donors. We can restore from these backups in case of catastrophic failure. Initial copies are 5 tape, 51TB. We expect the next copies to be 8 tapes each, and around 80TB.
Looking to the future - I already have outlined a move to refresh our hard drives this year. We're on a pile of old drives, and 500GB free of 131TB on the array. Moving to less drives for more storage is the move now, and is the direction we are heading.
Z+ - Business is still small, but the quality has improved greatly.
Thanks again folks, and here's to another 10 years!
This is officially our 10 years of being public, thanks to the support of thousands of people like you over the years.
TL:DR - Archiving is expensive, donations welcome. We've got a clear path forward, and are continuing to collect more pony data as we can.
The Bad:
Since I opened up ways to support the archive, I always set the goals around 50% of the running costs. This is now biting at my wallet, as it costs around $1400 a month to run as of June 2025 at our levels and replication. I've been putting 500-700 a month into TPA, for a while now. While this is offset by some one-time donations, it's still a considerable amount.
While 2024 was tremendously bad, 2025 has been OK. I'm still paying off debt from replacing damaged or failed equipment. Debt worries me, but doesn't affect TPAs data, which is what you're here for.
I'd like to focus on my future, and less on debt. I've adjusted the goals on SubscribeStar to reflect the actual costs. As always, anything is appreciated but I'll run this as far as I can. For a sustainable future, cost reduction has been a major focus.
The Neutral:
We have air conditioning in the server farm now. It unfortunately costs money to run. Rebuilding, refurbishing, and purchasing new hardware due to heat related damage, costs more. The servers use less electricity, make less noise, will last longer, and be more reliable now.
Rebuilding systems and arrays is stressful for everypony. Hopefully this puts a bit of preventative maintenance on that.
The Good:
We migrated servers - Newer hardware, faster load times, much reduced power usage, reduced infrastructure complexity. Moved systems from Dual Xeon E5-2690v4 to a single Ryzen 9 9950x.
Sorted archive - I sorted it. Deduped ~15TB, removed 22TB of outdated backups, and non pony.
Tape Backup - We have LTO8 tape backups now for TPA. 4 initial copies will be made and delivered to donors. We can restore from these backups in case of catastrophic failure. Initial copies are 5 tape, 51TB. We expect the next copies to be 8 tapes each, and around 80TB.
Looking to the future - I already have outlined a move to refresh our hard drives this year. We're on a pile of old drives, and 500GB free of 131TB on the array. Moving to less drives for more storage is the move now, and is the direction we are heading.
Z+ - Business is still small, but the quality has improved greatly.
Thanks again folks, and here's to another 10 years!
