Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

This is a good time to introduce the concept of backups. Remember to backup both to local storage and to have a copy that is remote, in case of natural disaster.

DC++ It was just sharing stuff. No search. You connect to someone’s computer, they have a shared folder. You download what you want and move on. Instead of searching for stuff, you discovered it.

Oink, Demonoid, AsianDVDclub... Various private Hotline sites circa 90s. Sadly missed

Newzbin.

Nzbmatrix

Napster

Taringa, it was the go-to place for everything, especially content in spanish

Haven't quite filled the void from 9anime/aniwave going down, hard to replace the king.

torrentz.eu, started my torrent journey in 2010 from this website.

nzbmatrix

You and another have already said it, but Emuparadise. It was...truly a shame. :'(

Black cats games :(

I remember using something called ourtunes back in college that just let everyone in the dorm freely access and download each others iTunes libraries on the dorm network.

ethor.net and rarbg.to

I still long for the old Scene Torrents days. RIP SCT

Free MP3 Download, which as of October 14, 2024 is still up on the megathread. The moment I start getting into downloading music online outside of downloading audio from yt videos, the site gets taken down a few months later. Now I don't know where to go for DDL since pretty much all of the other linked sites are either anime music, game music, or upload an [ Insert Service ] link and it'll give you an audio file to download from that service.

Asiandvdclub (not the shady remake)

What.cd. - RED is great but there's still a hole...

GrooveShark was a great music streaming service. If a track wasn't available you could just upload it and it would be available to all users.

It eventually got sued into oblivion leaving us with the streaming platforms of today. I really wish it could have made the transition to being legit because it had a great interface.

Demonoid. They had a community that put together a lot of high-quality torrents.

The overnight disappearance of xPhilez.

TheTrove was a collection of tabletop RPG books and magazines going back decades that has never had a decent replacement yet. It was fairly well organized and quite complete with tons of obscure games and out of print books. It had a different name or two before that but the collection always migrated somewhere until The Trove was finally shut down. I really miss that collection, even though I've managed to track down most of what I needed, it has been much more difficult since the shutdown.

Websites: rarbg and emuparadise

Personally: I have an 8tb HDD completely full with shows and movies I haven't tested since a house fire. I'm afraid it may have been dropped in the move, and I don't even have my PC with me to check it out

@Pyflixia This one might be a very obscure thing, but back when I was in high school, I used to download music from a website called mp3ostrov.~~ru~~com (edit: it was .com, apparently). Of course, the website was in Russian and I couldn't understand a damn thing, so I had to resort to the Chrome translation for it (Or I guided myself with the icons). But it had so much music on it, and it was really easy to get. And whatever I could not source from there, I downloaded from YouTube, but the downloader I used had too many ads.

Any and all sites that offer unique content that other pirated sites do not offer, such as unknown and unpopular animes/movies, every day they run the risk of being erased by the corrupt hands of the DMCA and unfortunately they may not have repositories for them due to their rare and unique gallery.

I will be loudly knocking on wood after posting this, but I set up my NAS with RAID5 and have had 1 drive die on me but I hot-swapped one in and recovered the entire volume.

No regrets, highly recommend raid5