International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals: Subscription

On August 19, 2019, several users reported that their Google synchronizations were broken. Discussion with Google technical support people revealed nothing useful, and included a request that I spend several days deleting 40,000+ files from the Trash folder of the synchronization account. Instead, we deleted the entire account (which took 60 seconds), and created a new master account. Doing this broke existing synchronizations completely. We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are unable to control how Google Drive behaves, or how Google Technical Support behaves.

IAPSOP distributes both its periodicals database and the Standard Spiritualist and Occult Corpus (SSOC) via Google Drive.

While both IAPSOP and SSOC are searchable via the Web, there's something valuable in having your own copy of the data -- both in terms of the searchability of the material, and in terms of preservation. Preservation-through-copying is what this technology substrate we call the Internet is all about, in part.

Anyone who's interested in doing so will be able to maintain an automatically-synchronized copy of the contents of IAPSOP (periodicals and monographs), via Google Drive. All that's required, on your part, is Google Drive (now called Google Backup and Sync, when installed on your PC or Mac) on your local machine, a reasonably fast network connection, and enough local disk space (on which more later). Because Google Drive, unlike Dropbox and some other similar tools, does not require that you buy storage from them when you're on the receiving end of a large distribution (Google only requires IAPSOP to buy the storage, which has been done), you can use a free Google Drive account to accomplish this, using this URL.

Remember to explicitly "add to Google Drive" after you invoke the URL above. If you don't know how to do that, see this short video.

Together, the IAPSOP periodicals and the SSOC are in excess of 500 gigabytes (half a terabyte). Consult IAPSOP's splash page for current figures. Ensure that you have adequate local disk space to hold the distribution. IAPSOP recommends that you refrain from putting your Google Drive's local copy on the same hard drive from which you load your operating system (your boot drive).

The Google Drive distributions are live -- as long as your Google Drive client is synching properly, you'll get updates for both the SSOC and the IAPSOP periodicals as soon as they're published, without having to do to anything.

Some things to note:

You need local disk space. Google Drive is a synchronization tool, essentially -- it makes sure that your local copy of a shared folder (in this case, the IAPSOP folders) is the same as the master copy, which is "up in the cloud," as we like to say. Unlike browsing via the web, where files don't get stored on your local machine until you specifically request them, this method puts EVERYTHING -- about 35 GB, at present -- onto your local hard drive, over your connection to the Internet, once you "add to Google Drive" via the URL above.

Put Google Drive on a separate physical disk -- for example, a USB-attached hard drive -- and not on the same disk you boot your machine from. That disk -- your boot disk -- will be the first disk to die, and a lot of activity on that disk will slow down other things. As IAPSOP grows, you'll need somewhere around 1000 GB -- 1 terabyte -- of storage to house it. One terabyte USB hard drives are, on Amazon, dead cheap. Those USB drives are also pretty slow, but if you know enough to know that, you know enough to case your own 15K SAS drive, or put the entirety of your Google Drive on an SSD.

This is a read-only copy. You can of course copy files out of the read-only image and do what you like to them, but you'll also be losing automatic synchronization on any files you copy out... and we do update existing files, more frequently than you might think. You can't add anything to IAPSOP via this share, either.

Make IAPSOP locally searchable.You can tell Windows Search or Spotlight to index your Google Drive area on your local hard drive, which means you can use Windows Search or Spotlight as a local search engine. If you want something more robust, consider X1 for Windows, or Foxtrot Pro for OS X (a lot of IAPSOP board members use Foxtrot with good results).

Creative Commons license in force. All IAPSOP and SSOC contents are released under a Creative Commons license (see below) that forbids any attempt to make money off IAPSOP or SSOC materials. We have already sent several cease-and-desist letters; our material is digitally watermarked; we will enforce the terms of the license.

Tresorit

All IAPSOP materials are shared via Tresorit, a secure and reliable file sharing mechanism. IAPSOP directors use Tresorit, rather than Google Drive, because of Tresorit's reliability.

Download Tresorit here.

Once Tresorit is installed and configured on your machine, use these links to gain access to IAPSOP collections: the monograph collection and the periodical collection

Keep in mind that you'll need approximate 1 terabyte (TB) of free storage to make a full local copy of IAPSOP's holdings, with room for that collection to grow as we add to it.