I can't speak for the OP, but you can buy optical media of old out-of-print magazines scanned as PDFs.
I bought the entirety of Desert Magazine from 1937-1985. It arrived on something like 15 CD-ROMS.
I drag-and-dropped the entire collection into iBooks, and read them when I'm on the train.
(Yes, they're probably on archive.org for free, but this is far easier and more convenient, and I prefer to support publishers rather than undermine their efforts.)
No torrents at all in this data, all publicly available/open access. Mostly scientific pdfs, and a good portion of those are scans not just text. So the actual text amount is probably pretty low compared to the total. But still, a lot more than 8TB of raw data out there. I bet the total number of PDFs is close to a petabyte if not more.
Care to make it publicly available? Or is that not permitted on your dataset? Certainly, there’s a lot more PDFs out there than 8TB. I bet there’s a lot of redundancy in yours, but doesn’t dedup well because of all the images.
I have >10TB of magazines I've collected so far, and I could probably source another 50TB if I had the time. I'm working on uploading them, but I've had too much on my plate lately: https://en.magazedia.wiki/
There is a significant issue with copyright, though. I'll remove anything with a valid DMCA, but 99.9% of the world's historical magazine issues are now in IP limbo as their ownership is probably unknown. Most of the other .1% aren't overly concerned as distribution is their goal and their main income is advertising, not sales.
