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datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
I assume it's not human driven. Maybe some automated archiver? Some bot looking for proof of pirated content, and just downloads everything it finds?
Right, that sounds like a good guess. That makes sense, bots are everywhere.
Some of it may be, but the fact that the LTS versions (20.04 & 22.04) are downloaded overwhelmingly more than the others seem to indicate it's more intentional.
Do old versions of Linux (Ubuntu in this instance) run better on really old hardware? That might be a reason if so.