A very long time ago, I started running Minecraft servers for my sons. We were all playing, and I wanted them to have a safe space that we could control and make the rules. It was a lot of fun, and the legacy of twoprops.net was that it held status information for the Minecraft servers.
I quit playing Minecraft long ago — no time for gaming. My sons migrated away from our home servers to more geographically diverse and enhanced servers. I’ve left ours up, because we created what I think are some pretty interesting worlds and, for me, there’s a lot of nostalgia. They’re running from my home junkyard server farm so it doesn’t cost much to keep them running.
They’re going to be hard to move to the island place, though. First of all, right now there isn’t enough electricity to keep everything going without burning gasoline or propane in a generator. Even after the full solar install is done, I’m not sure it’s worth the bother to keep the servers running when, literally, nobody is using them.
So why not just archive the worlds and store them away? That’s almost certainly what I’m going to do, but people who haven’t tried to archive data over decades would generally be surprised at how difficult it is to actually keep it viable. Media rots, so you need to actively refresh your backups and you need to keep multiple backups at geographically dispersed locations. It’s not just the data you have to keep, either: will the Minecraft of 2030 run worlds created on the Minecraft of 2015? Right now, Minecraft lets you run legacy versions, but will they always? I can keep whole machine images, but will they be compatible with the hardware I’ll have available at that later date?
It’s probably best to get the Minecraft servers running in a fairly standard virtual machine, and remember to check once a year or so to be sure I’m still able to get them running.
—2p