That doesn't make sense. Of course it's a "single point of failure". I don't think anyone could have ever thought otherwise. A competing archive service would undoubtedly be great for humanity.
I would argue that their attempt to even try this emergency library thing indicates that the people in charge are a bit too cavalier with what they have, for whatever (likely well-intentioned) reasons they may have.
And while individuals can mirror/datahoard the publicly facing parts of the IA, that's not all they have access too.
Sadly, my doctor also said I can't have the lollipop.
they have a duplicate headquarters in Vancouver now, a similarly grand building to their SF headquarters. Years ago there was a collab with the library of Alexandria in Egypt to host an offsite backup but I don't think it panned out.
At 99 Petabytes, an offline copy would take about 2,000 LTO-9 tapes. I'm not familiar with other vendors, but a single IBM TS4500 tape library offers about 400 PB of near-line storage and I don't think IBM would be making the largest ones in existence.
Also, CERN could host multiple copies on unused blocks of their storage farm.
edit: just found a StorageTek (now Oracle) that can do "57.6 EB of uncompressed data". That's just surreal. HPE sells a much more modest unit that can store 2.5 EB.
There was supposed to be a second archive at the Bibelotheque Alexandrina in Egypt.[1] It worked for a few years. But it seems to be down now.
[1] https://www.bibalex.org/en/Project/Details?DocumentID=283&Ke...
Maybe archive.ph will also surprise us, by being more resilient.
Anyway, it's an alternative, for now.
There are even many comment threads detailing their strategy to avoid legal takedown requests by serving content via an "anti-CDN" (i.e. always serving content from abroad whenever possible, to make legal actions more difficult).