Ask HN: Does anyone have a plan to back up the Internet Archive? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does anyone have a plan to back up the Internet Archive?

4 pointscsense6 comments

It's been widely reported that the Internet Archive is being sued, and they will cease to exist if they lose the lawsuit.

Does anyone have any plans to back up the data? Maybe a bunch of community members can get together, ask for IA staff to help take a snapshot of the archive before the lawsuit/appeals are officially over, then host the snapshot on IPFS or Bittorrent or something?

It might not have a nice UI that the general public can use, but so long as the data itself isn't lost, someone can always rebuild that. If they find the funding somewhere, and if the data hasn't been burned like the Library of Alexandria.

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It's not in danger of ceasing to exist. http://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/

This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books.

That said, hard drives are cheap again, and you can just go download the collections from the Archive that are interesting or important to you. However, the raw data from their own Wayback scrapes are not publicly available.

I'm worried the outcome of the lawsuit will be:

Judge: Copyright infringement, guilty, pay up, $2 billion.

IA: Your Honor, our balance sheet only has $100 million.

Judge: Okay, then here's a court order. All your money now belongs to your victims. Terminate all staff salaries, contractor agreements, and vendor payments including your cloud hosting accounts. Auction off all your physical hard drives and servers. Do it in 30 days. If you don't, the police will come to your offices with guns and do it for you. They'll also arrest your staff and send them to jail for contempt of court and stealing your victims' money.

Is anyone asking for that though?

Some attempts have been made, but it is decidedly non–trivial. Last I checked it was over 50 petabytes of data and growing rapidly.

Oh its definitely more than 50PB now, its more 129PB now

Now that you mention it, the last time I checked was a fair number of years ago.

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