Date   : Sat, 21 Jun 2008 18:14:44 +0100
From   : bfoley@... (Brian Foley)
Subject: The Micro User

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 10:28:41AM +0100, Andrew wrote:
> In message <314mFTNIO6388S10.1213970833@...>
>           "Dave Moore" <dllm@...> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Side note: Dave Edwards has two full sets of Acorn Users and has offered to
> > tear apart and scan one complete set. All he's asking for is TEN people to
> > express their interest and he'll get going <ref:
> > http://www.stairwaytohell.com/sthforums/viewtopic.php?p=12472>. So I urge as
> > many people on the list as possible to contact Dave and offer him some
> > encouragement!! (either via the contact form @ acornelectron.co.uk, or
via the
> > STH forum)
> > 
> To be honest, it does seem a shame to destroy any old Acorn magazines 
> given the non-permanancy of the web. I'd prefer a slightly distorted 
> image and the knowledge that they still exist in a well-kept library.

If they do eventually get scanned, I'd be all for buying a half decent
USB hard disc, posting it to the scanner, and getting an offline
backup of the originals that way.

If several of us did this, we'd have a multiply redundant, geographically
distributed set of backups which should be safe for some time to come.

For some back of the envelope calculations, an uncompresed 300dpi colour
page would be about 24MB, greyscale 8MB. If an issue was roughly 50% B&W
and 150 pages, you'd get about 2.4GB an issue. At 268 issues, that brings
us up to about 640GB.

Lossless compression would probably bring that down to significantly
less than 500GB, and a 500GB Western Digital MyBook is about 70 quid
on amazon.co.uk.

I'll grant this doesn't address the issue of keeping the scans
available online, but at least there'll be copies of it somewhere.
Perhaps at some point we could donate a copy to archive.org, although
I'm not sure what the legal situation would be like there.

Cheers,
Brian.