I’ve looked into this but they aren’t exactly small, it’s not a straightforward operation for even the average developer or systems engineer to restore these into a working format.
I was thinking we need something along the lines of a read only public mirror run by the proper open source community - e.g. SourceForge or a major Linux project… ISP’s and universities offer mirrors of Linux packages so this could be a resource offered in the same vein. That’s my line of thinking as far as a StackOverflow mirror goes anyway!
I was referring to the file size being the barrier. The 2024 large database size of 202GB is prohibitive for the average person’s resource capabilities. i.e. I have a home VPS host and I don’t even have that much free space. Your cloud operating costs would also go up with the storage and bandwidth use.
There’s also two separate issues I was kinda mixing up. I’m a developer who uses StackOverflow and would like to use a resource that is readily available. I think it’d take a few hours to setup even a smaller copy of SO, which isn’t ideal for answering a quick question. I also don’t want to setup a whole mirror site with custom work just for myself and because I’m paranoid Microsoft miight buy them and paywall SO overnight or something.