Probably a good idea to go see how much storage will be necessary...

This post foreshadowed today's AWS outage.

👀

I would also add Openstreetmap to the list

Did I miss something? Whats happening to debian stable?

I would add in some rom collections and book repositories as well. The whole library of Nintendo games is under a gig and would go a long way for entertaining people.

Book repos? I didn't know such a thing existed. Can you share more?
- Project Gutenberg has a large collection of public domain books

This is just minor datahoarding. I do it, on an extreme level.

Okay so where do I find some cheap hard drives? Europe if possible :-)

look for dvr's they have huge hdds in them and you can find them at thrift stores for cheap

old pcs off amazon usually come with good reliable 1/2tb harddrive.

You'll need about 500gb of free space. not too much of an ask tbh

It makes me really happy that people can say "500gb ... not too much of an ask" these days.
- Well we are talking about the greatest repository of human knowledge ever created. So we can afford to spend a little on it at least.
i know this because i actually do this. its more like ~300gb of space but its better to have even more just in case

It's been on my to-do list for a few years now.

For wikipedia you'll want to use Kiwix. A full backup of wikipedia is only like 100GB, and I think that includes pictures too.

Last time I updated it was closer to 120GB but if you're not sweating 100 GB then an extra 20 isn't going to bother anyone these days.
Also, thanks for reminding me that I need to check my dates and update.
EDIT: you can also easily configure a SBC like a Raspberry Pi (or any of the clones) that will boot, set the Wi-Fi to access point mode, and serve kiwix as a website that anyone (on the local AP wifi network) can connect to and query... And it'll run off a USB battery pack. I have one kicking around the house somewhere
- Just built one of those using Dietpi as the OS and NVME M.2 for the storage. I have many different ZIMs and running different services and only using about 270GB.
  Works great for offline use. Probably should add an ISO or 2 as well.
- Do you recommend adding anything else to it?
  For instance, OSM maps?
  I've been thinking about running the Kiwix app + OSMAnd on an old Android phone and auto updating it once a year.
Yeah also if you make a Zim wiki or convert a website into Zim then you can run that stuff too. If you use Emacs it's easy to convert some pages to wikitext for Zim too
120GB not including Wikimedia 😉
Also, I wish they included OSM maps, not just the wiki.
- You can easily download planet.osm, I think it's a couple of TB for the compressed file.
You can also offline the whole of Project Gutenberg with Kiwix, it's about 70GB IIRC.

The English Language Wikipedia probably wouldn't be hard, or Debian Stable.

All of Debian's packages might be a tad more expensive, though.

This might be a good place to start for Wikipedia;
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_Wikipedia
It depends if you want the images or previous versions of wikipedia too. The current version is about 25Gb compressed, the dump with all versions is aparently multiple terabytes. They don't say how much media they have, but I'm guessing it's roughly "lots".

Welcome to datahoarders.

We've been here for decades.

Also follow 3-2-1 people. 3 Backups, 2 storage mediums, 1 offsite.

"backups"? Pray tell, fine sir and or madam, what is that?
- You know there's only two kind of people, those who do backups and those that haven't lost a hard drive/data before. Also: raid is no backup

Curious about the mindset of the one (so far) person who has downvoted this post. What is there to dislike about archiving Linux and Wikipedia? 🤔

They are probably using a phone app which allows you to swipe sideways to downvote and also using screen gestures to 'go back'. I've accidentally downvoted things this way.
- I accidentally downvoted this comment
They firmly believe that: Real men don't do backup, they cry instead.
- Real men don't do backups, they write the data back to disk by memory.
I use the website and it always automatically downvotes the 3/4th post.

I stumbled across this sort of fascinating area of doomsday prepping a few weeks back.

https://prepperpress.com/usb/

A nice addition to that, don't just make it a USB, but a raspberry pi. So you'd have a reasonably low-powered computer you could easily take with you.

Not suggesting this one as it seems a bit expensive to me, but https://www.prepperdisk.com/products/prepper-disk-premium-over-512gb-of-survival-content?view=sl-8978CA41

Just built one of these myself. I went NVME M.2 instead of SD Card to avoid data corruption. I know SD Cards are fine if you don't write to them a lot but if you wanna update or add your own stuff, scares me. Plus NVME is just so much faster.
- How would you access the info if electricity permanently goes out?
at this point why not just use a phone running postmarketos?
- You'd first have to buy a phone that can run postmarketos and these are much rarer than I wish they were. Is there even anything new that can run it? Pine64 stopped making phones and said they'll make a new one when they can make it RISC-V.
  Fairphone maybe I guess. 4 is listed as a supported device, but someone has gotten it working on 6 too.
- Last I checked (3 years ago) postmarketOS drained the pinephone battery in record time :(
- Cause if ya wanna go overboard like I did, 1TB of NVME storage, can add with SD Card if necessary. 16GB RAM. Very little learning curve for my part as I use SBCs often. Plus almost every Docker container and program I want works on RPi without any hassle.
  There's also more robust guides and community for RPi.
  Just my thoughts.

How would one go about making an offline copy of the repos? Asking for a friend.

Start from here https://wiki.debian.org/DebianRepository/Setup
Wikipedia has torrents of the text, but you'd have to download images separately.
Debian, and its base packages have mirroring instructions here. Third party repos would need mirroring separately.
- Hmm, 3tb to mirror all the architectures I have around is very tempting. I have an unused dual bay external, and another one that desperately needs (wants) to have its 4tb drives upgraded.
man rsync man cron xdg-open \ https://lmgtfy.app/?q=debian+rsync+mirror

Neither are that bad honestly. I have jigdo scripts I run with every point release of Debian and have a copy of English Wikipedia on a Kiwix mirror I also host. Wikipedia is a tad over 100 GB. The source, arm64 and amd64 complete repos (DVD images) for Debian Trixie, including the network installer and a couple live boot images, are 353 GB.

Kiwix has copies of a LOT of stuff, including Wikipedia on their website. You can view their zim files with a desktop application or host your own web version. Their website is: https://kiwix.org/

If you want (or if Wikipedia is censored for you) you can also look at my mirror to see what a web hosted version looks like: https://kiwix.marcusadams.me/

Note: I use Anubis to help block scrapers. You should have no issues as a human other than you may see a little anime girl for a second on first load, but every once and a while Brave has a disagreement with her and a page won't load correctly. I've only seen it in Brave, and only rarely, but I've seen it once or twice so thought I'd mention it.

I rarely get bounced by Anubis, but oddly enough it has happened to me a couple times in FF, I suspect it’s the fingerprinting resistance settings that cause this to happen? Hasn’t happened in a while though

I also recommend downloading “Flashpoint archive” to have flash games and animations to stay entertained.

There is a 4gb version and a 2.3TB version.

Is that Flash exclusive or do they accept other games from that era?
- I’m not sure, but I do think it’s just flash
There is a 4gb version and a 2.3TB version.
That's quite the range
- When I downloaded it years ago it was 1.8TB. It’s crazy how big the archive is. The smaller one is just so it’s accessible to most people.

FWIW :

    
fabien@debian2080ti:/media/fabien/slowdisk$ ls -lhS offline_prep/
total 341G
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 103G Jul  6  2024 wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2024-01.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  81G Apr 22  2023 gutenberg_mul_all_2023-04.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  75G Jul  7  2024 stackoverflow.com_en_all_2023-11.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  74G Mar 10  2024 planet-240304.osm.pbf
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 3.8G Oct 18 06:55 debian-13.1.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 2.6G May  7  2023 ifixit_en_all_2023-04.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 1.6G May  7  2023 developer.mozilla.org_en_all_2023-02.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 931M May  7  2023 diy.stackexchange.com_en_all_2023-03.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 808M Jun  5  2023 wikivoyage_en_all_maxi_2023-05.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 296M Apr 30  2023 raspberrypi.stackexchange.com_en_all_2022-11.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 131M May  7  2023 rapsberry_pi_docs_2023-01.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 100M May  7  2023 100r-off-the-grid_en_2022-06.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  61M May  7  2023 quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com_en_all_2022-11.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  45M May  7  2023 computergraphics.stackexchange.com_en_all_2022-11.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  37M May  7  2023 wordnet_en_all_2023-04.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  23M Jul 17  2023 kiwix-tools_linux-armv6-3.5.0-1.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  16M Oct  6 21:32 be-stib-gtfs.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 3.8M Oct  6 21:32 be-sncb-gtfs.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 2.3M May  7  2023 termux_en_all_maxi_2022-12.zim
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 1.9M May  7  2023 kiwix-firefox_3.8.0.xpi

but if you want the easier version just get Kiwix on whatever device in front of you right now (yes, even mobile phone assuming you have the space) then get whatever content you need.

If need a bit of help I recorded TechSovereignty at home, episode 11 - Offline Wikipedia, Kiwix and checksums with a friend just 3 weeks ago.

I also wrote randomly update https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/Vademecum and coded https://git.benetou.fr/utopiah/offline-octopus but tbh KDE-Connect is much better now.

The point though is having such a repository takes minutes. If you don't have the space, buy a 512Go microSD for 50EUR then put that on, stuff it in a drawer then move on. If you want to every 3 months or whenever you feel like it, updated it.

TL;DR: takes longer to write such a meme than actually do it.

Watch out for flash data corruption. Lots of cheap flash (USB sticks, SD cards, SSDs) lose data after just a few years of offline storage. Something something quantum tunnel bullshit, iirc.
So either look for media that guarantee long cold storage retention (lots of businesses need to keep shit for 10 years for tax reasons), or occasionally plug it in and let do the housekeeping.
- It's more that flash NAND uses a small electric charge to keep the NAND gates in the correct configuration. Over time, that charge dissipates. If you power the storage device every once in a while, you minimize these chances.
  Here's a video explaining why it happens to Wii U's after being powered off for a while. https://youtu.be/JHME4zLs6Qs
- User older flash tech can be useful here. You might not always need the highest density storage if you want to maintain files for a long time. Getting stuff built in a much larger process node makes for a much more stable form of storage.
- Thanks but even though it's on a plugged HDD I don't even care for any of that data. What I mean is that none of that data is sensitive. It might be useful, potentially, but it's not unique. What I mean is that if somehow my .zim file for Wikipedia was corrupted I could download it again from https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng&category=wikipedia or elsewhere in ~30min (just checked).
  What I'm trying to highlight here is more the process than the actual outcome.
  TL;DR: yes, if one is actually serious about just getting and storing, they should verify periodically if the data is indeed fine. What I do want to highlight though is to first know how to do it at all. Anyway, you are right that for a proper solution on the long run one must understand how (cold) storage actually works. My heuristic is that it's like can food (which I don't use much), it might last a while, but not forever.

Whoa, what are all those things you have?

Commenting inline :

    
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 103G Jul  6  2024 wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2024-01.zim
# encyclopedia Wikipedia English with images and more
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  81G Apr 22  2023 gutenberg_mul_all_2023-04.zim
# Project Gutenberg, book collection in multiple languages
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  75G Jul  7  2024 stackoverflow.com_en_all_2023-11.zim
# StackOverflow, programming questions and answers
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  74G Mar 10  2024 planet-240304.osm.pbf
# OpenStreetMap low resolution for the whole World
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 3.8G Oct 18 06:55 debian-13.1.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso
# Debian base ISO
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 2.6G May  7  2023 ifixit_en_all_2023-04.zim
# iFixit colection of guides to fix appliances
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 1.6G May  7  2023 developer.mozilla.org_en_all_2023-02.zim
# Web development documentation
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 931M May  7  2023 diy.stackexchange.com_en_all_2023-03.zim
# Do It Yourself Q&A
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 808M Jun  5  2023 wikivoyage_en_all_maxi_2023-05.zim
# WikiVoyage, the version of Wikipedia for traveling
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 296M Apr 30  2023 raspberrypi.stackexchange.com_en_all_2022-11.zim
# Raspberry Pi Q&A
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 131M May  7  2023 rapsberry_pi_docs_2023-01.zim
# Rasspberry Pi documentation
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 100M May  7  2023 100r-off-the-grid_en_2022-06.zim
# Off the grid documents
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  61M May  7  2023 quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com_en_all_2022-11.zim
# Quantum computer Q&A
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  45M May  7  2023 computergraphics.stackexchange.com_en_all_2022-11.zim
# Computer graphics Q&A
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  37M May  7  2023 wordnet_en_all_2023-04.zim
# Graph of words in English
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  23M Jul 17  2023 kiwix-tools_linux-armv6-3.5.0-1.tar.gz
# Kiwix to read .zim files
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien  16M Oct  6 21:32 be-stib-gtfs.zip
# public transport database in Brussels, Belgium
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 3.8M Oct  6 21:32 be-sncb-gtfs.zip
# train transport database in Belgium
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 2.3M May  7  2023 termux_en_all_maxi_2022-12.zim
# Termux, Linux tooling on Android, documentation in English
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabien fabien 1.9M May  7  2023 kiwix-firefox_3.8.0.xpi
# Kiwix Web Extension for the Firefox browser

Yeah not gonna lie, i think i heard someone in a youtube video a while back talk about how the entirety of wikipedia takes up like 200 gigs or something like that, and it got me seriously considering to actually make that offline backup. Shit is scary when countries like the uk are basically blocking you from having easy access to knowledge.

https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng&category=wikipedia
Yeah, it’s surprisingly small when it’s compressed if you exclude things like images and media. It’s just text, after all. But the high level of compression requires special software to actually read without uncompressing the entire archive. There are dedicated devices you can get, which pretty much only do that. Like there are literal Wikipedia readers, where you just give it an archive file and it’ll allow you to search for and read articles.
- if you remove topics you are not interessed it can shrink even more
UKGOV haven't started on things like Wikipedia yet. They know kids use it for school and blinded by ideology though they are, even they can see there'd be an enormous backlash if they blocked it any time soon.
If that's going to happen at all, I doubt it would be before the next election. That's whether Labour get re-elected or the Tories make an unexpected comeback. You can tell how far Labour have fallen in the eyes of their party faithful when they've taken a Tory-drafted policy and made it their own.
Ironically, the up and coming third option fascist party, have said they're going to repeal the Online Safety Act. They have other fish to fry if they get in, and they'll want to keep their preferred demographic(s) happy while they do it.
I assume that eventually something like the OSA would come back to "protect the children". They love the current US President.
None of this is hopeful. Take this as more of a rant.
- Every day it seems the entire west is gonna bee a fascist hellhole in a decade
- I'm certain that when UK forces DigitalID upon the nation it will be a requirement for access to every website

I thought the whole point of torrenting was to decentralise distribution. I use torrents to get my distros.

In my own little bubble, I thought that's how most people got their distro.

What happens when they just cut the underwater cables? Torrent over carrier pigeon for a linux distro would take ages
- We need some more community wifi projects
  Community Wisps are cool
- Sneakernet to the rescue. Some of you are too young to know about walking around with boxes full of disks.
- Pigeon latency is horrible, but the bandwidth is pretty great. You could probably load up an adult pigeon with at least 12TB of media.
- A good way to see what the future of places like the U.S are is to look at places like North Korea, where they do exactly this, move files around on flash media to avoid the state censors.
- Tiny jump drives on pigeons is low key excellent imo
@Maroon I thought torrent technology to be a godsend for package managers.
Why none of them use it?
I mean, damn.
@AnimalsDream
- git and the lot are a lot better at this than people realize.
- Turns out hosting a bunch of files is very cheap.
- Torrents are often used for installers, but for packages it tends to be more trouble than what it's worth. Is creating a torrent for a 4k library worth it?

If you do this please share your IP so I can use your backup too

Unlike OP, I'm not some hacker trying to get your IP address. I just need your regular address? :)

Is there a context to this or just random thought?

You can ignore politics, but politics will not ignore you.
- Is there a political movement targeting Debian and Wikipedia?
gestures at everything

I can answer one part of your question. Yes, it's not as big as you think it is.

does this include images?
- With images, it is 111,08 GB
- No

Last year I bought a hard copy of my favorite webcomic in case the website goes down.

To paraphrase Stan Lee here, comics are like boobs. They look good on the internet, but there is just something special about holding them in your hands.
Which webcomic?
- Girls with Slingshots, it ended over a decade ago, but I still love the characters. I realized if the author dies and stops renewing the website it could disappear. As a foundational part of my early twenties I couldn't accept that.
- Different guy but Sunstone.

Sorry, I'm out of the loop. Is there something particular that triggered this that I missed?

The broad censorship of government data in the US, combined with the recent political attacks on Wikipedia caused me to download the whole English Wikipedia earlier this year. Guessing OP is similar
Not sure why they'd download Debian with all packages though
Edit: I should mention it's less about a potential loss of Wikipedia as it is a personal source of truth on politically sensitive topics that get censored, or turned to propaganda by bots
For example the Wounded Knee Massacre. Pete Hegseth has recently been calling it the, "Battle of Wounded Knee". I wouldn't be surprised if the current administration went to war with Wikipedia and forced them to 1) Change articles they disagree with, and 2) Hide those changes from history
- My rationale with Debian is that distros are kind of like portals to entire compendiums of free and open-source software. With the increasing attacks on vpns in particular right now, I'm concerned there are any number of programs we take for granted that we might not have access to soon.
  The internet is already deeply enshittified. There is a real possibility that it will no longer be a free and open web in any capacity soon. So it's past time to make archives, and start setting up meshnets.
- I had downloaded the full (no pictures) Wikipedia earlier this year for exactly this reason. This thread told me about kiwix, which is awesome, so I downloaded the "Wikipedia .08" using kiwix, which is the best 45,000 articles from Wikipedia with pictures and it's 7G, very manageable, has most topics anyone would care about.
Well for starters, teachers have had to start telling students that .gov websites are no longer considered credible sources for research.
- Nice!
Nothing in particular that I'm aware of, just a growing recognition that things are very much not well in the US these days.
Yeah I wonder too.
I saw that post about texas requiring app stores (specifically says mobile devices, so not the typical distro repository... yet) to have age verification. If they expand that, it would mean all linux distros, while maybe leaving the windows .exe downloads (ugh, shudder) alone. Wikipedia is probably more relevant in most folks' minds for having a backup though.

Wait, isn't there an offline copy of a part of Wikipedia? The article Just by yourself a nice printer with enough ink and do it yourself ;)

It could cost a bit if you wanted to keep it up to date.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/59/

we need all repos to be stored offline, and documentations to troubleshoot.

the 1st i have no idea how much space we will need. Most linux packages are prerry light, no? But there is A LOT of them...

the 2nd is easy. Heard someone say the entire of wikipedia is 200GB, should be doable. Dont forget the technical wikis too: Debian, Gentoo, Arch.

Can't remember who it was (b3ta? popbitch? penny-arcade?), but I recently saw a comment by someone who's been running a website since the turn of the millennium, and they said that fully 99% of the links they posted two decades ago were no longer valid.
To really put that into perspective, you have to remember that for most sites to get linked to from a popular site like that, meant that it was usually something of value that would have had a lot of work put into it, and that people found interesting or useful.
- It’s truly devastating how much of the old internet has died to the corporations taking over the internet.
The official USBs of Trixie fit all 28 DVDs of AMD64 on a 256GiB USB stick
https://www.linuxcollections.com/products/debian/debianusb.htm?id=51007
You'd probably want the 512GiB with all the sources for a real backup in this scenario

Years ago I bought a physical encyclopedia. I remember having one as a kid and using it for school reports. Also just looking through it can be cool. Learning about something you never knew existed is just a unique experience and doing it through a physical book just deepens the whole experience.

I also learned the practice of printing a physical encyclopedia is going out of fashion. I think there is only one company the still prints a yearly encyclopedia and it's not Encyclopedia Britannica of all things. Might have change since I bought my copy but go give some physical media some love if you can.

Get out of my mind.

I would love to have a small Wikipedia browser that can survive the apocalypse.

E-ink display, mini keyboard and touchpad, multiple ways/ports to transfer info, All wrapped up in a heavy duty equipment case that's able to survive a building collapses and burns in an earthquake, that's shielded from EMP.

You mean like the wiki reader:
I used it as an ebook reader until the screen gave out.
Sounds like the beginning of a proper Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Actually having something telling me Don't Panic is big friendly letters would help my mental health...

don't let your dreams be dreams, friend

I keep a wiki copy as well as Reddit pre-fuckuspez. A Debian archive copy sounds like a good idea.

the whole reddit? how big is it?
- Ask OpenAI, since it is in their dataset 😂
I'm also curious about the reddit archive. Did you copy it yourself or is this available somewhere?
- I got it from Archive.org. There was a monthly dump. I can't easily find it but that's where I got it from.

Or, in this post fact era just generate a wiki with a hallucinating AI instead.

https://github.com/XanderStrike/endless-wiki

Honestly this project looks like a lot of fun.

I downloaded wikipedia a month or two ago, I recommend it.

How big is Wikipedia?
- If you don't care about edit history, and only care about English, there are zim files w/ images for <150 GiB

So I actually have a dockerized Debian/Ubuntu mirror I think is like 2 versions ob Debian and the latest Ubuntu and still less then 1tb in total size. The English wikipedia is 50gb so overall not that much and very doable. However pretty unnecessary

At this point I just keep it because I'm to lazy to change the apt.soruces files for the VM/physical PCs in my network again.

Wait why keep Debian? What happened to Debian?

Nothing, it's probably an attempt to have something stable and unchanging, so that aging doesn't show much.
The meme doesn't seem to be about Debian becoming bad, more like data hoarding.

Official numbers here https://www.debian.org/mirror/size

About 4.4TB, but that's all architectures and (I believe?) all distributions (stable, testing...).

If you only want source+all+amd64+arm64, and only want stable, it will be smaller of course.

Not nothing, but at $10/TB or so, it's not much.

And if you're following 3-2-1, I'm pretty sure the "1" is already handled for you :)

Kinda curious where you’re getting $10/TB from
- You're right, for new drives it looks like a little more with this 20GB retailing for $230, or $11.50/TB.
  For refurbished, I recently got a factory renewed 12TB Seagate for $112 ($9.33/TB), but that price is now up to $199 for the same drive (!).

I still have a copy of wikipedia from 2021 somewhere on my NAS.

On prem NAS or SAN… you should have built it 3 years ago.

why? what happened 3y ago?
- All the AI slop and internet censorship asking for ID now?

Might store it on an external HDD. I got plenty.

If anyone is interested in philosophy, religion, or just want to archive it for historical reasons, IIRC sacred-texts.com has a USB version of their entire archive. They sell it, but I'm sure someone could find a work around there, if they were opposed to supporting them* for some reason. It's a massive collection of philosophical and religious works, and I believe they even have things like constitutions and legal works, as well.

*I know nothing about the people that run it or their ideology

Thanks for reminding me about this.
- Absolutely! Do you dare speak out against the words of the prophets‽

I heart there is Wikipedia on ipfs. Is that a good solution for Linux packages too?

What's a way to create a local repo mirror?

When the Arch wiki was getting DDOS'd a few weeks ago I got a local copy from the AUR that was pretty handy.

There should be.

I saw that Wikipedia was having funding problems, what happened to Debian?

They lie. Wikipedia has plenty of money. Do not give those parasites any more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Spending_and_fundraising_practices

I bought a 14tb drive just for backups of all my other drives... and I got a shitload more space.