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Author Topic: IL-2 1946 RRR project (Reclamation, Restoration, Reindexification)  (Read 3101 times)

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sercrets

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What is the RRR (Reclamation, Restoration, Reindexification) project?
RRR is an initiative started by sercrets and Ta183Huckebein. The purpose of this initiative is to Reclaim, Restore, and Reindex all available content for 1946, and find and restore missing content that has been lost to the sands of time. The project will accomplish this via the uploading of user game files in which lost resources such as the directories where skins, tutorials, campaigns, missions, and other files were once installed into.


The reasoning behind this initiative
There may be somewhat a "dark ages" going on within 1946.

Historically, the dark ages is a time period in reference to the period of time directly after the fall of Rome to the Byzantine empire. The Roman empire was an illustrious empire, which was very technologically advanced and from a historical aspect should never really have fallen, and only fell due to the division of the Roman empire itself. All of that technological advancement and achievements disappeared over night as the byzantine empire was largely primitive and did not value advancement. Then the dawn of the Dark Age happened and badda bing badda boom, you are now knee deep in medieval times. It took many decades/centuries to reclaim the technological status that Rome had achieved, and arguably, had the Roman Empire have not fallen, we would be at an even larger technological advancement than we are currently at. Ah well, C'est la vie (That's life). I digress.


A similar thing is happening within the 1946 community. This was high-lighted via the recent passing of a friend. One moment he was there, another moment he was not. He lived in the UK so any effort to recover things he worked on, (He was not a 46 player, but a flight sim nerd nonetheless), would be astronomical. Hence, I am embarking on this project this summer. It is partly out of necessity, redundancy, as well as personal interest.

Introducing the RRR project (Reclamation, Restoration, Reindexification)



This initiatives intention is to host a data storage system in an attempt to archive almost everything that is currently available for the 1946 community, as well as find what has been potentially lost to the decay of the internet. This would involve scraping M4T incase of its inevitable downfall (God forbid the day that happens), as well as any other current site out there. This would be accessible to anyone at any time, as a type of alternative to mediafire or any other hosting areas which may fall in the future (We have seen this in the past with dead mediafire, dropbox, and google links). 

We are very hopeful that you will willingly donate your collection of downloads to this project, however, many may ask a valid question; What is Required?

This is meant to be as easy as pie and nothing harder than that. No requirements of stipulations whatsoever are held over the uploader. If they wish to index and organize it, they may, or, if they wish to just upload their entire game install for the staff of RRR to pick through, then that is perfectly acceptable as well. If you would feel so gracious in which to provide a text file or a message briefly documenting what you have/where it came from if you can remember that would be fantastic, however it is not required by any stretch.

What are we looking for?

Quite Literally Anything and Everything


We are looking for:

-Skins
-Missions
-Campaigns
-Standalone Mods
-Server Scripts and Aids
-Maps
-Training Videos
-NetCaches of skins and missions.
-Mission making resources such as documentation on certain things etc
-Anything else that is not listed we will take. (Seriously, anything)

What do we currently have?

We currently have on storage:
      - An estimation of 100k skins
      - 1246 campaigns
      - Over 800 Gigabytes of mod files, game backups, training resources, and much more!

Things to look for in the near future:
  - A new website, resulting in the project being made public and a new upload system.
  - Regular updates on the project
  - A list of files that we know are missing from old internet archives or user memories.
  - As well as many more things!
 
The future of Il-2 1946 data sits in the palms of our hands at this very moment... It is our hope and dreams that this will cement the future into a strong foundation, enabling the community to grow and advance in many more ways!

If you have any files you would like to donate to the project, you can contact us here on SAS, M4T, Discord, or Email il21946rrr@gmail.com

Cheers,

sercrets and Ta183Huckebein.




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WxTech

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Re: IL-2 1946 RRR project (Reclamation, Restoration, Reindex)
« Reply #1 on: June 13, 2024, 09:55:18 AM »

On principle I have no issue with making any of my work available to any person or entitiy, for I offer it free to use for any purpose by anyone. Not least because my efforts exist solely due to the giants who preceded me and upon whose shoulders I stand. No proprietorial silliness from me!
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Frankiek

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Re: IL-2 1946 RRR project (Reclamation, Restoration, Reindex)
« Reply #2 on: June 13, 2024, 10:24:07 AM »

Me too, I have a large collection (2-3 terabytes) starting with the very first IL-2 up to these days and will happily contribute.

Said this it seems to me that the main problem in building this IL-2 nuclear vault (or Svalbard world seed bank for the peace loving) are the working hours needed to properly order all the material collected, get rid of redundancies. 

In the late empire, early middle age this work was provided by thousands of monks/scholars (and muslim equivalents) that carefully preserved, copied and archived the legacy of the classical world.  but these days do we have the equivalent?

In any case for me a good starting point would be the incredible work of C6_Dore partially rescued by Mike
https://storebror.it.cx/derrierloisirs.fr/il2/bdd2012/ 
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sercrets

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Re: IL-2 1946 RRR project (Reclamation, Restoration, Reindex)
« Reply #3 on: June 13, 2024, 11:11:49 AM »

On principle I have no issue with making any of my work available to any person or entitiy, for I offer it free to use for any purpose by anyone. Not least because my efforts exist solely due to the giants who preceded me and upon whose shoulders I stand. No proprietorial silliness from me!

Fantastic. I will send you the login and you can add as you go as to what you feel fits...

Me too, I have a large collection (2-3 terabytes) starting with the very first IL-2 up to these days and will happily contribute.

Said this it seems to me that the main problem in building this IL-2 nuclear vault (or Svalbard world seed bank for the peace loving) are the working hours needed to properly order all the material collected, get rid of redundancies. 

In the late empire, early middle age this work was provided by thousands of monks/scholars (and muslim equivalents) that carefully preserved, copied and archived the legacy of the classical world.  but these days do we have the equivalent?

In any case for me a good starting point would be the incredible work of C6_Dore partially rescued by Mike
https://storebror.it.cx/derrierloisirs.fr/il2/bdd2012/ 

True, I suppose we shall establish an order if you will, perchance it be called the "Monks of the RRR"... Anyone who is willing to help peruse and organize such a thing is very welcome. 2-3 TB sounds magnificent. How this will work is I will create a folder in my account named "Frankiek", or "WxTech", or anyone else who uploads, and you can dump everything in there (I have noticed google does not happen to LOVE .exe's, so mind you will need to zip or .rar those to prevent google from knowing what is in it...), and then the Monks (Anyone who volunteers to help curate this), can go through and properly document things... As to C6_Dore's work if that is where you wish to start in terms of archiving things and becoming one of these such Monks, feel free.. Give me an hour or two to finish setting up the account, I have some things to do in between then and now.

Any and all help is greatly appreciated, I thank both of you for your initial enthusiasm.

cheers,

sercrets.
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Dimlee

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Re: IL-2 1946 RRR project (Reclamation, Restoration, Reindex)
« Reply #4 on: June 13, 2024, 01:21:49 PM »

Great project!
Just two thoughts at the moment.
1. Most probably, you already have an emergency plan... but as a resident of Ukraine, I should mention how important the independent power source is, and not just a small UPS with a 500VA battery but something more durable. Also, if you have a choice of Internet provider, PON technology is preferable, again, subject to your router and optical units/terminals having emergency power.
2. How to avoid the duplication? For example, person A sends 200GB of his skins collection but most of it has already been included in the uploads by persons B and C and in the M4T site copy on your NAS, etc...
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sercrets

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Re: IL-2 1946 RRR project (Reclamation, Restoration, Reindex)
« Reply #5 on: June 13, 2024, 01:32:57 PM »

For now it would need to be user curated... Hence the need for many curators... I think the first step is to simply get it all in one spot, and then slowly sift through it. As for skins as long as the file names are not renamed we should be able to identify duplicates pretty simply... And yes I will be investing in USPS... If you have anything that you have collected over the years as well feel free to shoot me a message... Thanks for the support!

cheers,

sercrets
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sercrets

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Re: IL-2 1946 RRR project (Reclamation, Restoration, Reindex)
« Reply #6 on: June 13, 2024, 02:46:34 PM »

Sent a message regarding the login both to Frankiek and WxTech...

Many more are welcome, speak up :)!

cheers,

sercrets
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sercrets

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Re: IL-2 1946 RRR project (Reclamation, Restoration, Reindex)
« Reply #8 on: June 13, 2024, 09:33:24 PM »

Cheers! If you have anything to archive let me know!

cheers,

sercrets
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Vampire_pilot

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Re: IL-2 1946 RRR project (Reclamation, Restoration, Reindex)
« Reply #9 on: June 13, 2024, 10:49:53 PM »

I have harddrives full of bullshit that dates back a century decade or two. Not even I know what I have and how much.
Of course I can contribute BAT and a vast collection of skins and templates. I'd be happy to participate in an uploading experience.

SAS~Storebror

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Re: IL-2 1946 RRR project (Reclamation, Restoration, Reindex)
« Reply #10 on: June 14, 2024, 01:42:26 AM »

Good show, sercrets! Consider me a fully-fledged member of the donors' club. I've got a whopping 3 TB of digital goodies, though some of it is about as useful as a chocolate teapot due to their gargantuan size and lack of relevance (official patches, full game folder backups, all those mod packs, you know the drill).

The crown jewels of my collection are undoubtedly the sources (yes, there's a mountain of them), flight models, and my 3D tinkering efforts, which are, quite frankly, bananas.

the incredible work of C6_Dore partially rescued by Mike
https://storebror.it.cx/derrierloisirs.fr/il2/bdd2012/
Frankie, old bean, I've managed to salvage _everything_ from C6_Dore. Some of the more hefty folders (those bursting with modpacks, for instance) have been tucked away from public view, thanks to the "friendly" chaps from "the other side of the fence" who seemed to have made it their life's mission to download these files ad nauseam the moment they appeared, thereby guzzling all the bandwidth of the host these files were residing on.

sercrets, I trust you won't mind if I share a few musings that sprang to mind when I read your original post. As you're probably aware, I'm a bit of a dinosaur in the IT world, so there's a fair few things that people are trying out for the first time where I can confidently say "been there, done that, got the T-shirt". So, these thoughts are up for grabs to help avoid falling into the same old traps. I don't expect anyone to take them as gospel - they're merely ponderings.

  • Uploading to and downloading from Google Drive.
    My previous employer (a modest outfit of ~10,000 employees, $1.6B turnover) jumped headfirst into Google Workspace in 2013. We once tried to "lift&shift" an existing fileserver to Google Drive manually by copying all content over. The fileserver was a mere 60TB, nothing to write home about as we had a fibre connection internally and 2GB/s externally. We estimated the transfer time to be about 10 hours, without causing any disruption to other services. Officially, Google slapped an upload limit of 750GB/day/user, but what we actually faced was a whole lot worse. Google sneakily applied a bandwidth throttling _and_ a "number of files per minute" throttling. After one day, we'd only managed to transfer about 200GB. Go figure! So, I fear those of us with sizeable collections will struggle to upload them to Google Drive straight from their main PC, and you'll have a devil of a time getting the files back from Google Drive to your NAS.
  • General Backup concept.
    From what I gather, you want your NAS to be a timeless archive for files that might otherwise vanish into the ether. In this setup, your NAS is the master, so you need a backup. For the reasons mentioned above, I'd rule out Google Drive for that task. A suitable cloud backup provider largely depends on your geographical location and the amount of dosh you're willing to part with.
  • NAS purchase.
    I'm the proud owner of a Synology NAS myself (more on that later), so if Syno is on your shortlist, we could nip the "cloud backup" question in the bud by simply using Syno's built-in mirroring mechanism and syncing your Syno to mine. Technically, this works with any NAS (rsync is your friend), but you'll find that NAS manufacturers make life a breeze if you pair two of their NAS'es natively.

Since I'm one of those "no backup, no mercy" types, allow me to briefly explain the setup I'm using for my IL-2 development works:

  • Master: That's my Gaming PC and to some extent our FAC Gameserver (which mirrors part of the most recent dev works).
  • On-Prem Backup: Synology DS 920 with 2x12TB HDD, RAID 1. Relevant folders from Gaming PC are synced to the NAS "live" (2.5Gbe connection)
  • Cloud Backup: Jottacloud (https://www.jottacloud.com), a cloud provider who keeps everything within the EU, adhering to European GDPR rules and not suffering from "patriot act" etc.
    5TB cloud storage, uncapped speed. Uplink from my end is 40MBit/s, but I'll probably switch to 250MBit/s uplink soon.
    Backup runs from NAS by a nightly cron job through rsync to Jotta.
    Emails on alert.

]cheers[
Mike
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sercrets

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Re: IL-2 1946 RRR project (Reclamation, Restoration, Reindex)
« Reply #11 on: June 14, 2024, 08:24:39 AM »

Good show, sercrets! Consider me a fully-fledged member of the donors' club. I've got a whopping 3 TB of digital goodies, though some of it is about as useful as a chocolate teapot due to their gargantuan size and lack of relevance (official patches, full game folder backups, all those mod packs, you know the drill).

The crown jewels of my collection are undoubtedly the sources (yes, there's a mountain of them), flight models, and my 3D tinkering efforts, which are, quite frankly, bananas.

the incredible work of C6_Dore partially rescued by Mike
https://storebror.it.cx/derrierloisirs.fr/il2/bdd2012/
Frankie, old bean, I've managed to salvage _everything_ from C6_Dore. Some of the more hefty folders (those bursting with modpacks, for instance) have been tucked away from public view, thanks to the "friendly" chaps from "the other side of the fence" who seemed to have made it their life's mission to download these files ad nauseam the moment they appeared, thereby guzzling all the bandwidth of the host these files were residing on.

sercrets, I trust you won't mind if I share a few musings that sprang to mind when I read your original post. As you're probably aware, I'm a bit of a dinosaur in the IT world, so there's a fair few things that people are trying out for the first time where I can confidently say "been there, done that, got the T-shirt". So, these thoughts are up for grabs to help avoid falling into the same old traps. I don't expect anyone to take them as gospel - they're merely ponderings.

  • Uploading to and downloading from Google Drive.
    My previous employer (a modest outfit of ~10,000 employees, $1.6B turnover) jumped headfirst into Google Workspace in 2013. We once tried to "lift&shift" an existing fileserver to Google Drive manually by copying all content over. The fileserver was a mere 60TB, nothing to write home about as we had a fibre connection internally and 2GB/s externally. We estimated the transfer time to be about 10 hours, without causing any disruption to other services. Officially, Google slapped an upload limit of 750GB/day/user, but what we actually faced was a whole lot worse. Google sneakily applied a bandwidth throttling _and_ a "number of files per minute" throttling. After one day, we'd only managed to transfer about 200GB. Go figure! So, I fear those of us with sizeable collections will struggle to upload them to Google Drive straight from their main PC, and you'll have a devil of a time getting the files back from Google Drive to your NAS.
  • General Backup concept.
    From what I gather, you want your NAS to be a timeless archive for files that might otherwise vanish into the ether. In this setup, your NAS is the master, so you need a backup. For the reasons mentioned above, I'd rule out Google Drive for that task. A suitable cloud backup provider largely depends on your geographical location and the amount of dosh you're willing to part with.
  • NAS purchase.
    I'm the proud owner of a Synology NAS myself (more on that later), so if Syno is on your shortlist, we could nip the "cloud backup" question in the bud by simply using Syno's built-in mirroring mechanism and syncing your Syno to mine. Technically, this works with any NAS (rsync is your friend), but you'll find that NAS manufacturers make life a breeze if you pair two of their NAS'es natively.

Since I'm one of those "no backup, no mercy" types, allow me to briefly explain the setup I'm using for my IL-2 development works:

  • Master: That's my Gaming PC and to some extent our FAC Gameserver (which mirrors part of the most recent dev works).
  • On-Prem Backup: Synology DS 920 with 2x12TB HDD, RAID 1. Relevant folders from Gaming PC are synced to the NAS "live" (2.5Gbe connection)
  • Cloud Backup: Jottacloud (https://www.jottacloud.com), a cloud provider who keeps everything within the EU, adhering to European GDPR rules and not suffering from "patriot act" etc.
    5TB cloud storage, uncapped speed. Uplink from my end is 40MBit/s, but I'll probably switch to 250MBit/s uplink soon.
    Backup runs from NAS by a nightly cron job through rsync to Jotta.
    Emails on alert.

]cheers[
Mike


Mike, thanks for the lovely response! I had completely forgotten about googles file upload limit… I see this company you speak of, sync, offers unlimited cloud storage for about 20 dollars a month. Have a look: https://www.sync.com/pricing/ if you do not see any catch 22’s we will switch to that as I am paying 15 a month on drive for 2 TB and we naturally need about 10 right off the get go, when we take your collection, Frankiek’s collection, as well as probably WxTech/Ta183Huckebein’s collection.


Thanks for the wonderful suggestions, I am not done researching the NAS so I’ll look into what you were suggesting with linking yours and mine.

I am excited to find out what we will “rediscover”! I will add you to the “monk” list!


Cheers,


sercrets
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