I dig archiving. I keep snapshots of various altchans cooking, and have deeply enjoyed pursuing others collections (and writeups!) covering bits of the net I care about. I come from imageboards and anon-centric spaces
. Things there are very ethereal, threads die fast, communities splinter and fragment, sites die without warning, and a lot of the culture and history of the space is lost. It's a machine that churns out lost media at breakneck speed. Fortunately there have been numerous attempts to document the history and archive threads and images. Many of these archives go down for extended periods, some never come back, or come back with content missing. Lots and lots of the history is word-of-mouth or poorly sourced, with content going back to the 90s and English versions going back to '02 or '03
As a result of being unable to find stuff I read on archives, wikis, and imageboards from a decade ago I've started archiving archives recently. Mostly focusing on the places that document and archive these spaces directly. Wget is your friend, archiveteam are your guides in this space. A few folks in the space have formed a loose collective and sharing code, disks, and a wiki so all of our contributions can be shared.
If you want to get into archival start by learning to archive. Start archiving. Get some disks. Write some scripts, crawl stuff you care about and save it first! Then find a community of folks doing the same thing and share the burden and learn from their wisdom. An archive that's unknown and impossible to find is of limited use :)
Is there a Reasonable Alternative to the Internet Archive? I love the Archive and wish them great Prosperity, but the biggest Risk of Preservation is not the How the data stored, but who stores it. If the Archive disappears because of whatever reason, what will we do? How much will be lost? Does there exist another Entity that can act as a Parity to the Archive? Is that other Entity Independent enough that If the Archive is violently destroyed, can the other persist?
I am curious if such an Entity already Exists or if something like that can even exist parallel to the Archive. Or if its existence alone a reason for the Archive to go under. As funding must be split somehow between those two then. Which could result in both of them not having enough Money and failing.
No, there's no one out there as large as archive.org. Amongst archivists they're well funded and they've been at it a *really* long time. They were founded by someone with early-days-tech money that knew how to fundraise and never stopped. As of 2021 they have 750 physical servers, 30,000 storage devices (with 20,000 being being hard drives), adding up to over 200 Petabytes of data, growing at a rate of 25% year over year. Reading around the usual sysadmin hangouts enterprise customers that are buying petabytes of storage are paying around $75,000 dollars per petabyte storage node. You could negotiate a volume discount for 200PB I'd imagine :^)
Archive Team are probably the biggest, baddest rouge archivists on the 'net. Even they offload most of their stuff to the Internet Archive. They're a very loose collective, but they have some good folks that have been fighting the good fight (e.g. the textfiles.com guy). They tried for years to grab a significant portion and failed. Storing that much data reliably in a decentralized matter is a really hard problem to solve. Internet Archive themselves are offloading some of it to IPFS and filecoin, but again, decentralization of that amount of data is hard, especially since they seem to be the only real game in town. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina has a copy up to 2007, but
What you can (and what others are) do(ing) is backup a portion of the collection that you care about. Numerous data harvesters, hoarders, and haulers keep local copies. Digging through the archive team wiki there's a few backups of the wayback machine dating to around
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