CRAN mirror size mushrooming; consider archiving some?

Hi, everybody

I'm setting up a new CRAN mirror and filled up the disk space the
server allotted me.  I asked for more, then filled that up.  Now the
system administrators want me to buy an $800 fiber channel card and a
storage device.  I'm going to do that, but it does make want to
suggest to you that this is a problem.

CRAN now is about 68GB, and about 3/4 of that is in the bin folder,
where one finds copies of compiled packages for macosx and windows.
If the administrators of CRAN would move the packages for R before,
say, 2.12, to long term storage, then mirror management would be a bit
more, well, manageable.

Moving the R for windows packages for, say, R 2.0 through 2.10 would
save some space, and possibly establish a useful precedent for the
long term.

Here's the bin/windows folder. Note it is expanding exponentially (or nearly so)

$ du --max-depth=1 | sort
1012644 ./2.6
103504  ./1.7
122200  ./1.8
1239876 ./2.7
1487024 ./2.8
15220   ./ATLAS
167668  ./1.9
17921604        .
1866196 ./2.9
204392  ./2.0
2207708 ./2.10
2340120 ./2.13
2356272 ./2.12
2403176 ./2.11
298620  ./2.1
364292  ./2.2
438044  ./2.3
595920  ./2.4
698064  ./2.5

I'm setting up a new CRAN mirror and filled up the disk space the
server allotted me. ?I asked for more, then filled that up. ?Now the
system administrators want me to buy an $800 fiber channel card and a
storage device. ?I'm going to do that, but it does make want to
suggest to you that this is a problem.

Why? Just for the mirror? That's nonsense. A 6 year old outdated desktop
machine (say upgraded to 2GB RAM) with a 1T harddisc for 50$ should be fine
for your first tries. The bottleneck will probably be your network
connection rather than the storage.