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Comment by fn42 | Hacker News Reader

"Hard drive from junk shop found to be from an old facebook server"

I do wonder how digital archiving will work in the future. Hopefully something better than "the archive.org volunteers decided to archive it"

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You tell archive.org how often to archive a URL. So its not really up to their volunteers but the general population.

What are the odds that archive.org will be around in 137 years?

The best bet would be the Library of Congress.

Assuming there will be a technological civilization in 137 years, I give it more than 50% that archive.org will be present in some form directly descendent from the archive.org of today.

Why 50%?

Because I don't feel very confident in the result, I just feel it's more likely than not.

There's a really bad problem with archive.org - that they retroactively apply robots.txt files. Simple:

    User-Agent: *
    Disallow: /

And poof, here goes history. Guess how many companies care?

> Guess how many companies care?

Many. But, more in the way of actively and enthusiastically supporting the ability to wipe the archive this way than, you know, being concerned that it is a problem.

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