For context, I predominantly do archival work of all kinds for the Pokémon series, (new and old, scans, assets, etc.) with a small part being the archival of full, high-quality, recordings of the video games for use in online content/media, all for free, and is used by hundreds of creators.
Currently, our best option has been to use the Internet Archive to record entire playthroughs of games— which are recorded, (under our decided best conditions) cut-up/efficiently edited, rendered, then uploaded. Since the majority of games released between 1996 and 2017 were designed for handheld hardware, this approach has worked fairly well— as the IA allows us to store largely uncompressed footage that we can directly download, even being able to downscale our recordings back to the game's original resolution (say, 160x144px) for pixel-perfect accurate screenshots. Entire runs range from 25 GB total (Game Boy) to roughly 75 GB, (GBA) which is fairly small considering that they're decently-sized JRPGs.
This approach has held up for modern console footage— with hundreds of hours worth of 2022's Pokémon Scarlet (1920x1080px at 30 FPS) clocked at just over 1 TB. All of this is to say, is that hoarding this data and making it easily accessible via archive.org has been a relatively smooth process, there's never-ever a downscale in quality.
However, a combination of recent scenarios have made me question the viability of this operation for the immediate future. For one thing, the constant legal issues, (and recent security vulnerabilities) archive.org has undergone over the years have worried me in the case of a permanent closure. Still, that alone wouldn't be a huge problem, since I have the space to routinely keep local backups of this content in-case that situation was to ever occur. What compounds this issue is the very sudden technical advancement made by the release of the Nintendo Switch 2— with every future Pokémon entry running at 4K 60 FPS. Suddenly, The Pokémon Company are releasing games whose total footage jumps from 1 TB to 8 TB, and often in pairs, every single year. Since we don't get much of any donations or financial support for our project, storing 16 TB of new-game footage— possibly more— every year is a financial (and logistical) nightmare.
I wanted to run a few options by the sub for advice, and to see if there were any alternative methods that I hadn't considered.
a) We upload 4K/60 FPS footage to YouTube, and IA gets a smaller 1440p/60.
Seems like the most viable for maintaining a 4K backup, but I have no idea what an optimal 4K/60 yt-dlp download looks like nor how bad the site's bitrate degradation is for videos at such a high resolution.
b) We move directly to Torrenting and dedicate a couple of people with every new release to seed footage.
Obviously comes with the issue that we barely get support as is (despite my audience size) and I'm eternally afraid of one (or both) of those people disappearing and having the content vanish. Would also be significantly harder to access for many people, there would be downtime, etc.
I realize that this post might be missing context or detail in any area so please let me know if there's any more info I can provide!
