I realize things like IPFS exist, but as far as I'm aware those require manual file pinning. I want to just donate storage and bandwidth to back the files up, not have to specify which ones to back up.
https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_sa...
In the end you need a decision layer to decide what to back up that decides what based on some standard of what's good for society.
But maybe you don't need to centralize the storage, I could imagine a distributed IA which mostly piggybacks on other people's storage.
There'd probably have to be some index (can IPNS be used for this?) to specify the root, and then you could specify you want to store XXX GB of random data from this root node.
I'm betting someone could create an open source project to traverse the Merkel tree, choose random blocks, and pin them... It could be made smarter by also checking the number of peers per block and prioritize the least pinned blocks.
Edit: And a related discussion I found: https://www.reddit.com/r/ipfs/comments/b4he2m/idea_partialse...