So you want to be a TEXTFILES.COM Mirror.

TEXTFILES.COM was started in 1998 to rescue megabytes (later gigabytes!) of BBS-related history. With a humble collection of 9,000 files gathered from his BBS days, Jason Scott has grown the site (with help from many others) to an extremely large place indeed.

But all this effort to save the history of the BBS isn't any good if a simple matter of a hard drive crash or the biological processes of a single person can drop it all into obscurity again. So, to avoid this possibility, people have volunteered to be mirrors of the sites. Perhaps you want to be one too. This page has been set up for you to understand what being an "official" mirror of a textfiles.com site entails.

Have a solid connection. If you're on a DSL line, a cable modem, or using the services of a free hosting service, take it from me, you don't want to be hosting textfiles.com. In most cases hosting such a site will violate your terms of service, get you shut down for excessive bandwidth usage, or simply not work like you expect it to. Keep copies of the site and be happy with your collection.

Be willing to lose some bandwidth. The numbers are a little difficult to pin down, but the whole of the sites do gigabytes of traffic a month, with some of that being people grabbing huge swaths of the website. For a mirror, we're finding that people are definitely going into the hundreds of megabytes of traffic a month. If you think you can handle this, it can be done, and we can always take your mirror away if it turns out you cannot. But if you pay for your bandwidth usage by the megabyte, please, don't hurt yourself.

Have a lot of disk space. The way that the mirrors are set up, you can actually pick and choose which textfiles.com sites you want to mirror, which means if things get a little rough for you on the disk space side, you can stick with what fits. But if your site has a relatively small disk, you are going to be sad. Relatively recent statistics for the site are at the bottom of this document. On the other hand, disks are getting cheaper and cheaper, and are outstripping even the site's growth significantly.

Own the site you're doing this on. This is not a strict requirement, but you will likely run into a lot less flak for running the site if you're the admin than if the person running the machine finds out you just stuck a massive multi-gig history tumor on the user directory drive. This will also allow you to keep things under control when it comes to synchronization and other housecleaning.

Still Interested?

Wow. Well, if that didn't scare you, nothing sounds like it's going to. Here's the additional details you will need to become a mirror. First of all, all mirror synchronization of the site is done via the RSYNC program. If you don't know what that is, go to the samba site, download it, and learn it a little. Also, you should set up a virtual textfiles.com site on your machine, either in the form of sitename.textfiles.com, or textfiles.sitename.domain, like textfiles.cow.net. After you do this, contact me about setting up synchronization.

There are actually many, many textfiles.com sites, which you can browse if you go to the bottom of the main page. In 2003, after running that side of things rather haphazardly, the sub-sites were split off into separate mirrors, which is an excellent event considering that some had grown into the tens of gigabytes. Which of these sites you want to mirror, that's all you have to do. The table below gives the general sizes as they currently stand.

Please contact me at jason(@)textfiles.com to become an official mirror. Remember that it is possible to become an unofficial mirror, not open to the public but just backing up the site for the good of history. However things work out, thank you for the desire to join the pantheon of mirrors, and I look forward to our conversation.