Archiving hosted images

Over the years I've noticed many posts with missing images. A lot of people use free services to host their images and those websites go out of business or delete images after a certain amount of time. But VAF is an amazing resource and it's a shame for the data to disappear.

I would like to propose that we (or I) archive the current images to safeguard against future loss. Then in case those images are gone we (with Doug's help) could do some sort of url replacement to the new location. Honestly, I think all he would need to do is put a proxy in front of his website that does string replacement on the HTTP response for broken image urls.

I am considering just spidering (slowly and non-invasively) the site to get the list of images, but before I do this I would like some feedback, especially if there are easier ways to get the list of images - For example from the VAF website database directly.

Thoughts?

Quick-and-Dirty pricing estimate

Let's do a quick-and-dirty pricing estimate.

There are on the order of a million posts on VAF (according to the forum index). If every single post linked to a 1 MB image then there would be 1 TB of images.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) costs right now $0.023 per GB per month to host (ignoring data transfer costs). Therefore 1 TB would be $23 a month. That's not a crazy cost, especially if spread across a few extra-helper VAF members, and honestly if no one else would be willing to split the costs I'd probably just pay for it myself, especially if it's just archived data and not doing all of the hosting.

This really a discussion that you can only have with Doug Reeves. PM him and let him contact you. I?m sure he has his reasons for not allowing his Forum to be tied to a archived hosting service.