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Archiving the Internet Archive? (kbin.earth)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Takumidesh 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Why federated and not just regular p2p?

Internet archive already supports torrents.

[–] JusticeForPorygon 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

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

[–] Takumidesh 1 points 1 month ago

Each person doesn't need to host everything.

The Internet archive already has torrents that get automatically created, you can right now go and download/seed torrents for some items and you are immediately doing your part in decentralizing the Internet archive.