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?
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
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.