This incident brings up a good point: Who archives the archives?
archive.org does use torrents and I have one such torrent laying around in my client, which occasionally connects to peers although the the trackers are currently offline. I suppose a new client would find me and other peers through the DHT. I'd share a magnet link for someone to try, but it's a copyright-ignoring ROM dump archive so it may not be the best idea to post it here.
It's interesting that torrents may not be the first thing that comes to mind. They have the "PR issue" of being the now seemingly mundane way in which we've been downloading DVD rips for the last 20 odd years. Newer technology like IPFS does a better job making the cool core of this technology actually sound cool.
I would say the problem is discoverability and actual deployment.
For suddenly popular files it can be a way to donate bandwidth most of all, because then there might suddenly be a lot of peers. For the vast majority of files however, there won't be any other peers and they have to be web seeded by Archive.org either way.
Then there's the discoverability problem. Ultimately you need something like a magnet link to connect to a swarm.
(or r/archiveteam ?)
Personally, I have archived a few of the magazine collections.
> Much was learned in the process, and many thanks are given to the dozens of people who donated time, space and coding efforts to make the system work as long as it did. A number of useful facts and observations came from the project.
> The Internet Archive continues to explore methods and code to decentralize the collection, to have a mirror running in various ways - these include IPFS, FileCoin, and others. The INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK project also added general mirroring and tracking code to a number of projects that are still in use.
IA called this their Postmortem, but it sounds... intentionally opaque. Also, I'm not sure if this website is affiliated with archive.org, since they say at the bottom of their homepage:
> Archive Team is in no way affiliated with the fine folks at ARCHIVE.ORG Archive Team can always be reached by e-mail at archiveteam@archiveteam.org or by IRC at the channel #archiveteam (on hackint).
[1]: On paper, at least; the founder, Jason Scott, seems pretty involved with the IA as well, and I’m not really sure how much the teams intersect.