consider using IPFS pinning as the long term archive for all files
With #356 (closed)#398 (closed) active, we now have a dedicated server for IPFS pinning. We can make a VM on OSUOSL that is big enough to host the archive for a couple of years. It looks like the repo is growing at about 1TB a year right now.
We really do not need to have the giant archive be live on all the mirrors, especially the really old releases. Having the files in IPFS mean we could still keep all the releases live on IPFS via IPFS HTTP Gateways without requiring so much of the regular mirrors.
The IPFS archive setup can be implemented to just rsync from a mirror, then have the Kubo IPFS daemon work with the files off the filesystem, rather than making a copy in its own format.
The bigger project will be figuring out a way to keep things in the index-v2 but only have them active in the IPFS pinning server. Perhaps @jspricke's fdroid update
caching overhaul could handle this? Something like: really old releases get removed from archive/ but the metadata is still included in the index-v2 with the IPFS CID.