u/UdonSamurai

>I suppose this has long been overdue, so here is an edited write up of a post I made in response to someone worried about old Type-Moon manga chapters disappearing for good with the mass take-downs of manga sites in the past year. Hopefully it will serve to inform more people.

>I speak as the founder and leader of UMD, a translation group that has handled a large majority of current ongoing Type-Moon mangas for the past five years. Our members have also worked on a large variety of other TM content. Whether you were aware of it or not, you have probably come across or even consumed content translated by either me or my group. In the first post of this thread, I have compiled everything we have worked on, with direct links to said translations so they can be easily accessed.

Older TM Manga translations (Pre-UMD) are, quite frankly, as safe as they can probably be.

But first, some background.

I can’t speak for the Batoto era, but MangaDex essentially became the central hub for uploading and reading manga starting around 2018. For about six or seven years, almost every fan-translated chapter was uploaded there, either by the scanlators themselves or by third parties.

Because MangaDex was the "source," dozens of aggregate sites emerged that would regularly scrape its data to host the content themselves (presumably for ad revenue). This created a massive safety net; because there were so many identical mirrors of MangaDex, the vast majority of TM manga from that era exists in dozens of places at once. If one site goes down, ten more still have it.

The shift happened when this central hub model broke.

Once MangaDex faced major legal pressure and shifted away from hosting certain scanlations, there was no longer a single place to find "everything." Scanlators began splintering across different platforms. Because there was no longer one primary target for scrapers to follow, these aggregate sites didn't always know where to find the new source for specific groups, let alone something niche like TM Manga.

• Comick Era: UMD originally moved here. It grew large enough to become a secondary hub that scrapers followed, but it was eventually hit by takedowns as well. For that reason, most of the UMD chapters uploaded here can still be found on other sites.
• MangaTaro Era: We moved here next. Relatively underground at its onset, and while it gained some notoriety toward its end, was ultimately never picked up by scrapers. When MangaTaro faced its first shutdown, we were facing a situation where five months of unique uploads would have been lost if we didn't have our own backups. (It didn't ultimately shut down, but that's unrelated to this topic.)
• Weebdex Era: We were only there for two months before the owner shut it down. Those chapters did actually vanish from the web—we only have them because we kept our own backups.

That’s a seven-month period covering about 40 chapters where all our work could have been lost forever if we hadn’t kept our own backups.

But essentially, chapters from before 2025 are pretty damn safe because they were mirrored thousands of times during the MangaDex Golden Age. Even if the original source is gone, the images are still out there; you can usually find them with a quick Google search. While it’s always prudent to keep personal archives, there’s no immediate risk of that era of history suddenly vanishing.

It is the chapters from the past year and beyond that are truly at risk. Since scanlators have had to resort to jumping between smaller, underground sites (which should have been safer but ultimately didn't save them), many of those chapters (like some of Fumei’s Proto or Konan’s KNK chapters) never got mirrored. If the host site dies and there are no backups, they really do disappear.

The reality is that any site large enough to be convenient is currently being hunted by publishers. There is simply no guarantee that a platform will last more than six months. It’s a massive headache for us to constantly re-upload everything, and it’s a headache for readers to deal with dead links and missing chapters. Which is why we’ve ultimately shifted back to the Google Drive approach—the average manga reader won't be able to find our work, but it’s the easiest way to ensure the work actually stays accessible for TM fans.

Long tangent aside, you don't need to worry about the old chapters.