Outernet storage

Othernet Hardware
1

So, I read that the satellites now broadcasts 1Gb of data per day. But I also read that the machines (I don’t know the proper term) only got 4Gb of storage in it. Wouldn’t that fill up really fast?

Also, I was kinda thinking that this may be good for a library in our elementary school. But thinking harder, 4Gb won’t even be enough for a significant portion of just Wikipedia. Wouldn’t it be better if it had more storage space so that kids can access more content? And not just little kids, even high school kids could use it for some homework if only Wikipedia would be readily accessible.

Is that possible with the Outernet?

The 4Gb limit also makes me think that the system automatically deletes older content. Would this be accurate? If you added external storage, can this auto-deletion be disabled?

If there is no auto-delete, what happens when the storage is full? Will it simply wait for the user to free up some space so it can download new content?

I’m no expert but certain devices have limitations as to how much external storage it can recognize. I read somewhere in the forums that it’s 64Gb for the Outernet hardware. Is this true? What if I wanted to use… Say, a 1TB external hard drive?

2

Data is currently broadcast in weekly bins. These bins can be removed by deleting the bin folder. While there is no automation of removal, it’s generally not so difficult to do manually.

Automatic removal was done in the past, but picking the criteria for ‘old’ is a bit tricky. Someone may actually want to hold onto something even though it’s old, etc. Some content may be evergreen (e.g., educational material). We can’t just assume that you would download everything to your machine, because content is not always directly usable that way. So we subsequently removed the feature, and decided to organize the content in such a way that manual removal would be easy.

3

In the future (but no ETA), the goal is to have a section of the drive allocated to the newest content. That section would continuously auto-delete. But as Branko mentioned, we need to be careful about how this is implemented.