Preservation of historical ftp site content

[MrFlibble]

Some time ago I checked gamers.org but it was down (both http and ftp). I thought it was undergoing maintenance and when I checked back later it was working again. However, now it's down again, and already for several days if not more.

I was thinking, maybe it's time to start archiving those ftp sites that still have the old content of DOS and early Windows era games - the files themselves the directory structure (if present), date stamps on files, everything? The overall size of the files shouldn't be much of a problem with today's HDD capacity and Internet download speeds.

Here's a few potential candidates for archiving:

DOS, Win3.x and early Win95:
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/msdos/games/
ftp://ftp.pl.freebsd.org/vol/rzm1/coast/games/
ftp://ftp.padua.org/pub/msdos/dos/games/local/
ftp://delphi.hs-niederrhein.de/pub/dos/games/
ftp://ftp.uni-potsdam.de/pub/systems/dos/games/
http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/games/PC/
ftp://ftp.uni-potsdam.de/pub/systems/win95/games/
ftp://ftp.fi.netbsd.org/.m/archive1l/ft ... n95/games/

Early 2000s:
ftp://ftp.farlep.net/pub/clubix/demo/
ftp://ftp.farlep.net/pub/clubix/demo2/
ftp://ftp.farlep.net/pub/clubix/demo3/
ftp://ftp.peliplaneetta.net/pelidemot/
http://ftp.gameaholic.com/pub/demos/

Official developer/publisher ftp sites:
ftp://ftp.3drealms.com/
ftp://ftp.atari.com/demos/
ftp://ftp.bluebyte.com/demos/
ftp://ftp.ea.com/pub/
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/
ftp://ftp.gtinteractive.com/demos/
ftp://ftp.lucasarts.com/demos/pc/
ftp://ftp.team17.com/pub/t17/demos/
ftp://ftp.ubisoft.com/
ftp://ftp.virginmedia.com/blueyondergam ... ndergames/
ftp://ftp.westwood.com/pub/
ftp://ftp.wizworks.com/demos/
http://download.mvpsoft.com/

[DOSGuy]

That's a good idea, and quite easy to do using a program like wget.

[MrFlibble]

Interesting, I didn't know about wget, thanks for mentioning it!

[Edit] FTPs can also be copied by FTP clients like FileZilla, and also I've just discovered HTTrack which works for FTP and HTTP alike. However, none of them seem to preserve date stamps on folders, and date stamps on files seem to get corrected in accord with the host system time zone settings. Any way to circumvent that?

[Edit2] Sorry for some misleading info in my previous edit, both FileZilla and HTTrack do get original date stamps correctly except for Linux-based FTP servers that do not store time info, only dates, in which case time modifications when saving the file occur. Neither programme stores date stamps on folders though - at least, under Windows that is.

[MrFlibble]

Apparently the HTTP part of gamers.org is preserved by the Wayback Machine:
http://www.gamers.org/pub/

[MrFlibble]

ftp.gamers.org is back online.