Internet Archive played crucial role in tracking shady CDC data removals
Internet Archive makes it easier to track changes in CDC data online.
I'm a bit concerned for their long-term well-being right now. Does tech exist to make a distributed mesh / torrent style clone of them where millions of computers back up fragments of them? I'll toss a few terabytes at them.
I’m seeding the CDC datasets that were posted about a day or two ago. I’ve still got some terabytes to spare, though - are there any other datasets floating around out there that need to be backed up?
Check out Anna's Archive.
So glad I make monthly donations to them
Who outside the USA is backing up the Internet Archive?
Part of the collection is backed up in Egypt and, probably more importantly to avoid tampering, Netherlands. But most of the data is stored only in a few sites in California.
There's an entire data hoarding community on Reddit that tends to spring to action in cases like this. I'm relatively certain the backups will be distributed globally, most likely with torrents for even wider spread.
Not much great left about Reddit, but this is still an area where it shines.
There are alternative archival sites, some that operate outside US tampering, but IA is certainly the primary.
Unfortunately, the IA is absolutely massive. Anyone backing up anything is just grabbing what is personal to them, hopefully in a way that the pieces can be authenticated and re-assembled, but unlike Wikipedia we aren’t talking about copies of the whole thing, not even close. I think they are near or recently over 100 petabytes? Much will be lost if/when the IA is eventually targeted and disabled for whatever reason they come up with.
If the IA were to be backed up at any meaningful scale, I would think to ask the British to encourage their Museum to embrace the stereotype that they readily take everything, and apply it to the internet. America can no longer be trusted to house any accurate history of anything.
There are alternative archival sites,
To be clear, other archive sites that take snapshots of web pages are not really alternatives to the Internet Archive, which (importantly) allows uploading of arbitrary data for preservation. One example of this is mentioned in the article:
