Volunteers Successfully Mirror Myrient's 385 TB Game Archive Before Shutdown

The preservation community pulled off something genuinely impressive: a volunteer network of archivists and gamers coordinated through Reddit's r/SaveMyrient subreddit to fully back up Myrient's entire 385 TB archive, completing the job before the site's planned March 31 shutdown.

SaveMyrient moderator Ill-Economist-5285 made the announcement on Reddit, where the effort had been organized using independent archival servers and script-assisted crawls. "We've been kicking major ass in the background getting downloads completed and validated," the mod wrote. "We can now announce that the Myrient mirror is now 100% COMPLETE!!"

The effort, named Minerva Archive, represents the successful preservation of what many consider the largest publicly accessible game archive on the internet, covering downloadable ROMs and ISOs spanning platforms from the SNES through the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii U. Notebookcheck called Myrient "the go-to archive for easy access of ROM files used in emulation," and those files, as the site noted, largely exist in a legal gray area.

Myrient's operators had announced the shutdown roughly a week before the backup completed, citing rising hosting costs driven by skyrocketing RAM, SSD, and hard drive prices, along with insufficient funding and the additional strain caused by abusive download managers hammering the servers.

The data isn't fully in the clear yet. Ill-Economist-5285 said the team is still working on "generating torrents and getting them available," and the checksums on the mirrored files are still being validated to confirm completeness. The long-term survival of those torrents will depend entirely on how many community members step up to seed them. An updated website is also in the works, according to Ill-Economist-5285, though no launch date was given.

Myrient's own owner posted a message to Reddit thanking the community for the response. "Everybody has been commenting supportive comments on this thread and other subreddits and blowing up my phone," the owner wrote. "It makes me really happy to see the community coming together to save a common good. So, from the bottom of my heart, thanks everybody for the support. Let's spread the word."

The original Myrient site is still scheduled to go offline at the end of March, which means the Minerva Archive team has a narrow window to finalize torrent distribution before the source disappears entirely. Whether 385 TB of gaming history stays accessible long-term is now a seeder problem, not a backup problem.