Many thanks to zdevilinside for finding this for us. (He'd posted a link for the MSDN archive in a Win8.1 thread.) The Eye (https://the-eye.eu) Share and enjoy! ----------------------------------
Thanks Freezer! I really loved that site. To be honest, I was only looking for a MSDN archive and stumbled upon it. It truly amazed me to see that I could download a copy of MS Dos 3.3 and Windows 3.11 like I used 28 years ago. IS that really that long ago?
I will admit it that I didn't even notice the other stuff at first because the MSDN archive was so big. I went through every directory when I realized it had so much more than just the MSDN stuff and just drooled. I then looked at my external HD array, saw I had BARELY enough space left to take the whole archive...so I did. Did you see that if content is removed from the "website, we can still get the data to you. If you would like to request deleted data, join our Discord and message an Admin or Helper. We require that you give us an endpoint to push data to. These include Amazon Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox, SSH and FTP/SFTP Please note that we can not retrieve or distribute data that has been deleted due to a legal request." Between that and the fact that they give you the wget "vacuum" command already done for you makes it even better.
"to preserve culture". I love it. Sweet. You're right. (I've been there before too). They are just way more conservative than The Eye -- WinWorldPC is USA based but The Eye is European.
I finished my site rip of The Eye. My wife is going to allow me to buy 5 more 8TB drives and a new Synology Diskstation to control them.
I been spending my time building a RetroArch / Emulation Station, Emulator pack, my poor 1TB Data drive is under 100GB free and all my externals are used for photos and the couple I have for Movies/TV Shows. I'd say all up I have under 10TB total, would really like more space one day myself, I still use a 128GB for my OS boot drive on my PC and my Laptop has a 64GB one. I am currently using my main PC without backups, if I lose this emulator stuff, I'd have lost 4 solid weeks worth of tinkering with this major Emulator pack.
I was thnking that too, but it seems hard to have any kind of structure to work with without programming to some extent, even if its just programming the energy to take a certain shape.
See if you can find someone coming to Aussie-land from the US that will buy you either an Western Digital Easystore or Elements USB hard drive in the 8 or 10TB version and bring it back. You can "shuck" them and have excellent NAS-level hard drives. They used to be WD Reds but they are now most likely HGST Helium drives.
I FINALLY got my Synology Diskstation . I have 8x 10TB hard drives in it. I didn't catch that I left a 10TB drive out of the pool until after I created the RAID array (SHR). That is why it says "expanding" on it. I am still copying all the data over from the 40TB RAID-5 USB enclosure.
This before they went completely dark: And there are sporadic updates on their progress; but really mainly this from their recent discord news feed: For now, I've found a snapshot of the site on the Wayback Machine -- from October 12, 2021, which was the last time it was fully up & running: https://web.archive.org/web/20211012001619/https://the-eye.eu/ Ah, the irony.
Interestingly, the Wayback's snapshot is fully functional. Whereas the actual "The Eye" site's server is dead because the OS drive(s) have failed. (The data drives are unaffected fortunately)
Well, they say they're back but... No joy, yet. Also their data seems severely limited; at least compared to what if was back in October (https://web.archive.org/web/20211012001646/https://the-eye.eu/public/). But known links to ROM images, this: (So maybe something to do with DMCA )
