Tootfinder

Sometimes it is handy to use archives formats that do not confuse our windows friends. Or perhaps you want a quick listing, or to update files without reading and writing the entire thing (i.e. non-solid archives).
Zip or 7z can be handy. The problem is that with their Windows hertitage they do not (reliably) retain certain UNIX-y 'things'. Be that permissions or symlinks.
Here is an example symlink workaround. Permissions left as an exercise for the reader:

A simple shell‑based workaround for archiving projects with symlinks in formats that don’t preserve them (e.g. .7z or certain .zip files). It generates a script that records all symlinks, excludes them from the archive, and later recreates them after extraction.
A simple shell‑based workaround for archiving projects with symlinks in formats that don’t preserve them (e.g. .7z or certain .zip files). It generates a script that records all symlinks, excludes ...

#neu & #OpenAccess:
"Material Cultures of Archiving: An Introduction to a Global and Historical Practice"
https://doi.org…

While using the Wayback Machine the last few days, I've had a lot of "503 Service Unavailable" errors. I'm seeing those errors not just when archiving pages, but also when retrieving pages from the archive as well.
In the past, I've seen issues with Wayback Machine short-term corresponding to an event that would trigger a lot of archiving (example: a major government agency caught deleting web content.)

A lot of what I’m archiving has like 0 hits but I just know sometime, someone, maybe in a hundred years from now, will find it useful.
It’s a nice feeling to have contributed just a little to preserving our cultural artifacts.

I made a small thing. Just a little automated masto account @… to track updates to 7-Zip and RAR (WinRAR).
Why!? 🤔 These types of archiving tools are very handy but have been known to have security issues (both had exploits last year). Plus they don't always provide automatic update mechanisms on most platforms. 😉
It …

I've been messing with wget and HTTrack for archiving web sites... An artist friend of mine passed away last year and I have this fear his web site might disappear some day, and I want a copy of it.
The images are not hosted on his domain though, they are on a SquareSpace domain, but I think I've got HTTrack working to grab them all.
Still need to figure out the exact formula, so it'll take a bit of testing.

It probably helps that recently I have been looking at cpio archives in hexdump† (because that is the kind of nerd I am), so I know how archiving basically works under the hood.
For my own custom archive format, I only bothered to implement the absolute bare minimum I need.
† https://gist.github.com/…

Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms"
https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14957.001.0001
"The story of the rise of networked data through the evolution of archiving and digital storage."