We all have our favorites that we go-to overtime to meet our pirating needs. We’ve also watched a lot of big names in this year alone, go down in a blaze of glory and others in a whimper. I’m awfully curious what, to you, is the biggest loss to date?
For me it’s Uloz, first thing that came to mind. Uloz has served me very well in acquiring music albums through them, for a good 6 years I recall that I used them for getting albums. When they decided to switch the way in how they do their service, that to me felt like a sucker punch. No longer can I just collect album names, find a sacrificial wi-fi network and go to work.
I also remember missing ISOHunt, EmuAsylum, EmuParadise, OG Pirate Bay, AnimeSuge (soon HiAnime once the piss-ants of ACE get their way soon) and I really hope we don’t lose Internet Archive. But with the way it’s been hammered by shitty people and court lawsuits, I predict that it doesn’t really have much time on it’s side in the near future.
All I can say is just thank you to all of those sources and of course the ones everyone is familiar with. Helped save me a lot of money, helped me increase my interests and eh, can’t argue against free shit.
Definitely Vimm’s Lair for me. I still play a lot of GameCube and N64 games and Vimm’s was always my go-to place for finding roms. They got hit with a lot of DMCAs and take down notices, and had to remove the vast majority of their Nintendo library along with anything related to Sega and Lego. The site is still up, but it’s like visiting a graveyard now
This one hurt me really bad. I was just getting started with retro gaming and then all of this shit happened.
Could you give an example of a game no longer available? Just checked and was able to dl Luigi’s Mansion just fine
On GameCube, I can see that Legend of Zelda Wind Waker, Mario Party 6, Smash Bros Melee are all unavailable. On N64, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Pokemon Stadium are also unavailable
Deeeefonitely what.cd for me. RIP WCD. We have two great music trackers now, but nothing comes close to WCD.
What.cd and BitGamer were the two private trackers where I really put in effort not just to seed but to contribute unique uploads.
I stepped away from torrenting for awhile and when I returned both were ashes.
Edit- what are the two good music trackers you’re referencing?
Losing what.cd was like having a Music Library of Alexandria burn down. Such an amazing resource for rare, out of print, obscure, and or otherwise unobtainable media.
Opheus and REDacted are the two! RED has more and interview signups. I’m only on OPH because they welcomed WCD refugees and it’s been very good.
RED and the defunct Apollo both welcomed WCD refuguees at first, but they filled up fast.
Apollo is still doing awesome! It’s called Orpheus now.
I had no idea Apollo got resurrected. I gave up hope after a few months when it went down many years ago.
Oh yeah! They weren’t down for long before they renamed hahaha
figures lmao
Easily the biggest loss imo. RIP WCD.
Absolutely agreed
Demonoid. They had a community that put together a lot of high-quality torrents.
This and I believe it was called TvTorrents. Private tracker that was amazing for TV shows.
Megaupload. It was like the Library of Alexandria burning down. Not just pirated stuff, either.
I remember to swear by megaupload because all the other upload sites uses extremely sketchy ads and allow the fake download buttons.
Now Jdownloader is the only way for me to download non-torrents
TheTrove was a collection of tabletop RPG books and magazines going back decades that has never had a decent replacement yet. It was fairly well organized and quite complete with tons of obscure games and out of print books. It had a different name or two before that but the collection always migrated somewhere until The Trove was finally shut down. I really miss that collection, even though I’ve managed to track down most of what I needed, it has been much more difficult since the shutdown.
It continues marching on as The Eye.
If I understand, that collection is missing a lot from the original. I could be wrong though.
At least part of it survives. Better some than none.
I agree and thanks for putting me on!
One of my servers burned down and with it thousands of Terabytes of data.
Same about 6 months ago maybe. Didn’t burn down but my raid system corrupted everything if it losses power while reading and writing… It’s now rebuilt fully and on a UPS.
Edit the biggest L was the stuff that was not pirated on it like video game save files pictures, documents, etc
What RAID system did you use which corrupted your data on power loss? With software raid like zfs I believe corruption on power loss shouldn’t be a problem (unless the hardware fails. Or your using btrfs raid 5/6, ignoring all warnings).
Edit: For this reason I’m looking into buying another drive for an offline backup of my media files. I could redownload them, but it’d be increasingly more annoying.
I had a support ticket with them and they told me it was hardware failure. I’m not sure right now but I know It is and was raid 5.
I’d also bet against not hardware failure.
Traditional RAID5 (and others) is subject to data loss in the middle of a write that can break entire arrays if it happens.
Seen it on various LSI controllers, mdraid in Linux, and even a Windows implementation in Storage Spaces. I mean it’s rare and mostly won’t, but if you get unlucky and lose just enough data from just the right places, well…
Wouldn’t imagine that any particular NAS appliance is using some magic sauce that prevents it from happening if you get unlucky as to a crash/power outage.
Yeah since then i have a tape drive and two servers that are independent of each other.
;-;
tntvillage
It was, hands down, THE place for every Italian media
omg yes
You and another have already said it, but Emuparadise. It was…truly a shame. :'(
15ish years ago when Seagate was having lots of issues with their 2TB externals getting the click o’ doom I lost 6 2TB drives over 2 years.
The data was just data, easily re-acquirable, but fuck that was a pain in the ass.
Same happened to us. Not as much data. But two 2TB.
Going a bit old-school with this one, but unmoderated DALnet. It used to be the wild West, with everything at your fingertips.
+1, the IRC days were glorious
DALnet and EFnet were both great for that
SuprNova was the big one for me. Everything else was either redundant (Like RARBG) or just faded away (like my Usenet sources). I didn’t have any replacement lined up when SuprNova died.
Websites: rarbg and emuparadise
Personally: I have an 8tb HDD completely full with shows and movies I haven’t tested since a house fire. I’m afraid it may have been dropped in the move, and I don’t even have my PC with me to check it out
GrooveShark was a great music streaming service. If a track wasn’t available you could just upload it and it would be available to all users.
It eventually got sued into oblivion leaving us with the streaming platforms of today. I really wish it could have made the transition to being legit because it had a great interface.
GrooveShark, for me, particularly thrived on early Android as Tinyshark. It was probably one of the first ways I remember actively listening to whatever music I wanted to; no algorithm outside of the list of “most popular songs”.
If you like the interface, check out Funkwhale. It’s a federated service based on Grooveshark, but you need to provide your own mp3/flac files.
Oh hell yeah! That sounds great!
Asiandvdclub (not the shady remake)
What.cd. - RED is great but there’s still a hole…
Maybe not the actual biggest, but the loss of pirated material that i feel the most sad about is The Trove. The Trove was a website with a huge list of downloadable PDFs of source books for tabletop RPGs. I got the pdfs for everything DND, and also tried a bunch of other games I’d never heard of with a few friends. It also had downloads for other books and documents but I only used it for RPGs. I think it went down in 2019 or so.
I think there are some telegram groups with that type of material in them if you take a quick look. Not sure how they compare with your old resource though.
