With everything that’s happening there, I was wondering if it was possible. Obviously their size is massive, but I’m sure there’s a ton of duplicated stuff. Also some things are more important to preserve than others, and some things are preserved elsewhere (Anna’s Archive, Libgen, and Z-Lib come to mind that could preserve books if the IA disappeared).
But how could things get archived from the IA (assuming it’s possible) on both a personal level (aka I want to grab a copy of that wayback snapshot) and on a more wide scale community level? Are there people already working on it? If not, what would be the best theoretical way to get started?
And what are the most important things in your opinion that should be prioritized if the IA was about to disappear and we only had so much time and storage to utilize?
The Internet Archive is supposedly over 99 petabytes in size. That’s an unfathomable amount of data.
I think it’s actually about 150 PB of data that’s then also georedundantly stored in the US and Netherlands. That sounds like a lot, but I think it would be possible to distribute that amount of data
Archive Team looked at this about 10 years ago and found it basically impossible. It was around 14 petabytes of information to fetch, organize, and distribute at the time.
I think that something like the internet archive – where the body of data is too large and important to store in one place – is where using a federated framework similar to Lemmy might make a lot of sense. What’s more, there are many different organisations which have the incentive to archive their own little slice of the internet (but not those of others), and a federated model would help in linking these up into one easily navigable, and inherently crowd-funded, whole.
Why federated and not just regular p2p?
Internet archive already supports torrents.
Forgive me because I’m not very familiar with the technology, but 99 petabytes (estimated size of the Internet Archive) seems like a little much for even a large network of home computers.
Don’t get me wrong, decentralizing would be great, but I just don’t understand how it would be done at this level, especially when, in the grand scheme of things, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of people who would pitch in.
99 petabytes is not that much really, my NAS has a quarter petabyte of storage, some of which I can spare. This is something that just a few thousand volunteers could manage realistically
the „archiveteam“ tried this, but it failed, you can read about it here:
What are the conclusions of the research? Why was it shut down?
I mean unless you’re sitting on an exabyte of spare storage you don’t know what to do with it’s a pretty hefty undertaking.
Divide it up into torrent files of a reasonable size and have the community seed them, everyone helping as much as they can/want. You could even make a custom torrent client that automatically chooses the least healthy torrents on the network to download and seed
Obviously but so if the current storage gets corrupted /destroyed, there is no way to restore all that data?
As others have and will say, it’s an enormous body of content. And this has sparked a shower thought.
What about not trying to be a full, perfect backup, but instead a “best effort”/“better than no backup at all” shoestring budget backup? What about triage backup? What about stripped-down markup? What about lossy text compression?
its BIG. could be great to see some different teams tackle different issues.
for example a transcode team to tag and convert different media to the latest efficient formats might save alot of space.
and eg. voice-only recordings could be suitably encoded vs music etc
also some methods for diffing snapshots, or some kind of compromise on snapshots storage with minimal changes? not ideal but might be enough to get across the line maybe?
re. the “most important”, aside from specific items or archives, imo a crucial role might be text-only snapshots of most of the web. would help increase accountability amongst modern media outlets, journalists etc
Imo it’s probably not a good idea for another single entity to hold a copy of IA’s corpus. IA already operates on a shoestring but it still is expensive and labor intensive to operate, which requires an endowment or constant source of funding, both of which come with political entanglements. I just don’t think one org can be indefinite custodians of something so valuable.
A distributed technical solution may eventually be developed which enabled regular people to participate in storing and maintaining the corpus. I think IPFS was supposed to be this kind of solution but seems like the tech isn’t capable or mature enough (Anna’s archive abandoned IPFS for technical reasons and that’s a far smaller corpus). BTW IA has engagement with the dweb community and are interested in finding distributed solutions for storage of IA’s corpus.
just torrent everything and create little p2p servers :P
