The Portable Freeware Collection - FTP access/Site Dump?

[andrew777]

Hi,

Apologies if this question has been asked, I could find no reference to it or anything similar...

Is there a way to download all current apps in the portable freeware collection? Via ftp or an iso snapshot or something similar? I'm always needing random programs system utils/office programs and have limited internet access on my old win xp laptop and am sick of downloading and copying over programs individually.

Thanks for taking the time to answer, much appreciated.

Cheers,
A.

[tproli]

No. The majority of the applications are not hosted here at TPFC but you can download from the developers' site.

[guinness]

This is just a database.

[webfork]

Is there a way to download all current apps in the portable freeware collection? Via ftp or an iso snapshot or something similar? I'm always needing random programs system utils/office programs and have limited internet access on my old win xp laptop and am sick of downloading and copying over programs individually.

Unfortunately not, although this question comes up about every 6 months so you're certainly not the only one interested in that functionality. I tried in the past to make something like this available, but it turns out to be rather difficult.

[romulous]

Andrew did offer exactly this at one point in time (in the site's early days). There were a couple of CD ISO's of TPFC released. It's a shame they stopped - but I appreciate it is a lot of work keeping them up to date (setting aside any issues with distributing software - not all software authors are happy to have anyone else distribute their software).

[guinness]

Are you sure?

[Andrew Lee]

romulous is right. "Early days" are the keywords. There were only a handful of apps in the database then, and it was relatively easy to do so. Plus I wanted to try out BitTorrent as a mechanism for distributing large content.

As webfork stated, is it practically impossible now given how large the database has grown and how it is currently managed.

[I am Baas]

@Andrew Lee

Can you generate a list of all listed applications (+download link) and make it available to users?

[romulous]

Are you sure?

Yep, as Andrew confirms I don't think I have a copy of the ISO images any more on my hard drives, though I am not sure - I think there were two (maybe 3?) TPFC collections released as ISO's if I remember correctly. I think they were released a couple (or a few) months apart, and they were indeed via a torrent link on TPFC - the idea being that they would be semi-regularly updated to get the newest versions of the programs. But as Andrew points out, TPFC was much smaller in those days than it is now - far fewer database entries than currently.

[Checker]

"Early days" are the keywords

Because I don't remember having this makes me either an "very old" member and it's Alzheimer's disease or it makes me a young/new member

[guinness]

"Early days" are the keywords

Because I don't remember having this makes me either an "very old" member and it's Alzheimer's disease or it makes me a young/new member

Same here, I don't remember that.

[romulous]

TPFC is spidered by the Wayback Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www ... eeware.com

The earliest copy of the site it holds is 9 February 2005. If you check that copy, you will see the downloads:
http://web.archive.org/web/200502091927 ... eware.com/ (click the 'Downloads' link)

If you check 31 December 2005, the downloads are gone, so they disappeared sometime in 2005 (you could probably work out roughly when by spending a bit of time on the Wayback Machine):
http://web.archive.org/web/200512310322 ... eware.com/

So if you only started visiting the site from about 2006 onwards, you wouldn't have seen them. So 'Early Days' means early 2005 at the latest (my memory of the downloads themselves is from 2004).

ISO's were 76MB and 95MB back then I still only had a dial-up internet connection at that stage - small though they were, they still took a while to download!

[Checker]

@ guinness: Uups, it seems that we are new/young members
Now I can reduce my Alzheimer's medication

[Andrew Lee]

Can you generate a list of all listed applications (+download link) and make it available to users?

Seriously? Who else wants this? If someone else seconds this, I will do it. Though why someone would want to download _everything_, I cannot understand. Haven't we got enough information overload already?

[Midas]

From my layman grunt view, wouldn't it function as a sort of API foundation?