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The entire archive actually fits in a small desktop NAS (e.g. QNAP or Synology) with a few 14-18TB drives, you don't even need a server rack.

There is existing index in sql format distributed by libgen: https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/nh5dbu/a_brief_intr..., it is around 30GB uncompressed.

Those 851 torrents uncompressed would probably take half a petabyte of storage, but I guess for serving pdfs you could extract individual files on demand from zip archive and (optionally) cache them. So the scihub "mirror" could run on a workstation or even laptop with 32-64GB memory connected to 100TB NAS over 1GBE, serving pdfs over VPN and using unlimited traffic plan. The whole setup including workstation, NAS and drives would cost $5-7K.

it's not a very difficult project and can be done DIY style, if you exclude the proxy part (which downloads papers using donated credentials). Of course it would still be as risky as running Scihub itself which has $15M lawsuit pending against it.




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