Transcript:
Information about the closure of Myrient
Hello everyone,
I have decided to shut down Myrient on 31 March 2026. Until then, the site will continue to remain available in its current state. Please download any content you find important, as you have around one month to do so.
There are several reasons for the closure: - Insufficient funding As traffic continued to increase last year, the amount of funding from donations remained the same. I have been paying more than $6000 out of pocket every month in order to cover the difference which is not sustainable.
Paywalled download managers In the past several months, many specialized download managers were created that completely bypassed the site, donation messages, and download protections. Some of these download managers locked certain features behind a paywall that required users to pay in order to gain access. The use of Myrient for commercial, for-profit purposes has always been strictly forbidden. Such egregious and abusive usage of the site cannot be tolerated anymore.
Rising RAM, SSD, and HDD prices Since last September, RAM, SSD, and HDD prices have surged dramatically and continue to rise due to the ongoing extreme demand for AI datacenters. This has caused Myrient’s hosting expenses to go up as well. Necessary upgrades to the storage and caching infrastructure only exacerbated the problem. With a large number of servers and the aforementioned existing monthly deficit in excess of $6000 out of pocket, there is no way to pay for the increased hosting and hardware upgrade costs.
There are still many other smaller reasons, I could go on and on about them, but nobody would want to read it.
In short, I can no longer afford to run the site.
If you have any comments, you can send them to [email protected] (I will read all of them and might respond to a few).
Thanks for using Myrient over the years.
what is that site anyway?
An effort to rescue the files is ongoing at https://minerva-archive.org/
Do I need a Discord account to contribute?Is there a way to contribute without a Discord account?
I better set this up this arvo. Myrient archives so many old games that you literally cannot obtain all in an accessible way.
Losing the files would be a digital book burning.
…What is Myrient?
googles name
390Tb of history
…Oh. Oh, no. This loss would be painful.
I mean, not a gamer, but daaaaaamn.
A structured BitTorrent system could keep most high-demand files offline after initial seeding, especially if seeding rules like the ones MyAnonamouse uses were implemented. And the low-demand ones could remain online via a seedbox from anywhere, even from the operator’s basement.
Honestly, while I don’t have funds to take over normal operations or even provide seedbox space, I can see many paths out of this problem.
As I’ve looked through it myself I’m also seeing a decent amount of duplicated items, especially in their “Internet Archive” section for stuff that is at risk of being taken off IA. Multiple different format copies of the same game releases, or dumps of PS3 games by different scene groups.
And even if the Core Storage held everything straight out of the gate, you could do initial storage configured via RAID-10 using only 28× 30Tb drives.
In Canadian Pesos, that’s $34,000 before taxes for those drives. If the operating costs were in USD, that’s only 5 months of operating costs. Get a pair of used 4U 16-bay server boxes, and almost anything built within the last decade will work well as a SAN/NAS, especially if you use a specialized FOSS NAS OS.
A good strategy for migrating to BitTorrent would be to migrate the high value content first, so that bugs and failures ooze out of the woodwork as rapidly as possible. This would also allow you to build the NAS/SAN data storage boxes over time, one at a time, instead of all at once. And you can start with repurposed desktops as the seedbox itself and upgrade to more RAM once the BitTorrent client grows beyond the box’s initial resources. This stepwise growth would also give you the opportunity to work out any kinks and gotchas that you failed to anticipate.
For example, the BitTorrent client you choose to run on the seedbox itself will be a critical importance. I have found, through my own use of multiple clients, that by far the most aggressive BitTorrent client I have ever come across has been BiglyBT. I am able to achieve a ratio in weeks and sometimes even days the most other clients require years or even decades to achieve. For something seeding out, there is literally nothing better.
As an example: when MyAnonamouse banned BiglyBT, I tried an experiment, downloading the same movie file with several different torrent clients. After a full year of seeding, the runner-up was qBittorrent, with a ratio of 0.2. BiglyBT? A ratio of 870.
Same file, same super-seeding, but a massive difference between BiglyBT and pretty much anything else out there.
It’s a shame that so many closed trackers ban BiglyBT. It is absolutely an overall benefit to the ecosystem.
So I thought torrents could fix this. But that’s already in the FAQ
Why do you not make the content available to download via torrents?
The truth is that people are only willing to seed the content they are interested in and not obscure content that nobody has heard of. Direct downloads ensure full availability by allowing all content to be available for download, no matter how obscure it may be.
Additionally, as content in sets are always being added or updated, they naturally also have to be updated anywhere else they are available. Torrents are impossible to update without using BitTorrent v2, which has support for mutable torrents but is not widely adopted yet and has caveats.
Direct downloads ensure full availability by allowing all content to be available for download, no matter how obscure it may be.
Until the site shuts down.
I don’t think anyone’s ever going to argue that direct downloads aren’t more convenient, intuitive, accessible, and generally less risky for the downloader. But that comes at pretty steep costs/risks piled onto the host, which is why they’re so much harder to sustain long term.
Why not offload the high bandwidth stuff to torrents and keep the obscure stuff direct download? Seems like there could be a happy medium instead of this all or nothing nonsense.
The first part doesn’t make sense. If they’re hosting it, it’s available, whether over bittorrent or http. Bittorrent supports web seeds too, so it can be both!
It’s true that torrents don’t support changing content very well, though. For that maybe they should look at resilio or something.
Resilio wouldn’t work well for distribution…
But archive.org seems to handle torrents pretty well. When they have a bundle they add a torrent with the same content, and set up themselves as webseed… Then everyone can download either directly or through torrent, and choose to seed what they want. If the content changes, post a new torrent… Of course that means that any old seeders get invalidated… But if they care about seeding they could update the torrent and point it at the old download to avoid redownloading everything. But also, how often does this content actually change? If a game iso/rom is ripped/dumped correctly isn’t that data kind of final? Why would the bit-perfect data need to change?
