Moritz NegwerMay 17, 2025
The outright wrecking of the scientific infrastructure in the US under the current administration chilled me to my bone. Kept me doomscrolling. But I finally found a way to do something positive, in a small way: I dedicated some storage space and a bit of my internet connection to a decentralized backup of deleted research data.
I am happy to report that @SafeguardingResearch 's torrent swarm now has ca 14 TB storage and a Gbit connection more.
#sciop #safeguardingresearch #academicchatter
Show threadMoritz NegwerMay 17, 2025

@SafeguardingResearch

What I really did was dust off a bunch of random junk-drawer hard drives and tinker with LVM and docker settings for an evening.

If you think "I bet I can do this in half an hour", please go ahead and help the swarm.

If you haven't the foggiest idea what this is about but want a chance to do some good in the world, let me know and I'd be happy to help with setting up whatever you have available.

Maybe, together, we can keep the doom at bay for a little while.

Show threadMoritz NegwerMay 18, 2025

@SafeguardingResearch Holy cow, this blew up. Thanks for your attention, lovely people of the fediverse.

If you want to reproduce what I did, here's a rough guide:

1) Grab an old PC / Laptop / Raspberry pi, whatever you have lying around. If it has a network connection and some storage, it's probably fine.

2) Install Linux on it. Ubuntu is fine most of the time. I used Ubuntu server following this guide: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-ubuntu-server#1-overview

Install Ubuntu Server | Ubuntu

Ubuntu is an open source software operating system that runs from the desktop, to the cloud, to all your internet connected things.

Ubuntu
Show threadjonny (good kind)
@moritz_negwer
@SafeguardingResearch
Can we pull this into the docs (with attribution)?
May 18, 2025 at 8:58pmWeb
Show threadMoritz NegwerMay 18, 2025

@jonny @SafeguardingResearch

Yes of course! If you want the raw text and screenshots without having to pull them out of mastodon, let me know :)