It's frustrating that there's no way for people to (selectively) mirror the Internet Archive. $25-30M per year is a lot for a non-profit, but it's nothing for government agencies, or private corporations building Gen AI models.
I suspect having a few different teams competing (for funding) to provide mirrors would rapidly reduce the hardware cost too.
The density + power dissipation numbers quoted are extremely poor compared to enterprise storage. Hardware costs for the enterprise systems are also well below AWS (even assuming a short 5 year depreciation cycle on the enterprise boxes). Neither this article nor the vendors publish enough pricing information to do a thorough total cost of ownership analysis, but I can imagine someone the size of IA would not be paying normal margins to their vendors.
ia search 'format:"Archive BitTorrent"' --itemlist > itemlist.txt
Note that there will be more than 50M items returned by this query, so that command will take a very long time to complete (results are returned in 10k chunks). You'll probably also want to add something like `--timeout 300` as well so you don't get half way through only for the command to fail with a timeout.
(no affiliation, I am just a rando; if you are a library, museum, or similar institution, ask IA to drop some racks at your colo for replication, and as always, don't forget to donate to IA when able to and be kind to their infrastructure)
I would like to be able to pull content out of the Wayback Machine with a proper API [1]. I'd even be willing to pay a combination of per-request and per-gigabyte fees to do it. But then I think about the Archive's special status as a non-profit library, and I'm not sure that offering paid API access (even just to cover costs) is compatible with the organization as it exists.
[1] It looks like this might exist at some level, e.g. https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader, but I've been trying to use this for a couple of weeks and every day I try I get a 5xx error or "connection refused".
They have come a very long way since the late 1990s when I was working there as a sysadmin and the data center was a couple of racks plus a tape robot in a back room of the Presidio office with an alarmingly slanted floor. The tape robot vendor had to come out and recalibrate the tape drives more often than I might have wanted.
Not in the way I think you're talking about. The archive has always tried to maintain a situation where the racks could be pushed out of the door or picked up after being somewhere and the individual drives will contain complete versions of the items. We have definitely reached out to people who seem to be doing redundant work and ask them to stop or for permission to remove the redundant item. But that's a pretty curatorial process.
It's frustrating that there's no way for people to (selectively) mirror the Internet Archive. $25-30M per year is a lot for a non-profit, but it's nothing for government agencies, or private corporations building Gen AI models.
I suspect having a few different teams competing (for funding) to provide mirrors would rapidly reduce the hardware cost too.
The density + power dissipation numbers quoted are extremely poor compared to enterprise storage. Hardware costs for the enterprise systems are also well below AWS (even assuming a short 5 year depreciation cycle on the enterprise boxes). Neither this article nor the vendors publish enough pricing information to do a thorough total cost of ownership analysis, but I can imagine someone the size of IA would not be paying normal margins to their vendors.
Pick the items you want to mirror and seed them via their torrent file.
https://help.archive.org/help/archive-bittorrents/
https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive
https://archive.org/services/docs/api/internetarchive/cli.ht...
ia search 'format:"Archive BitTorrent"' --itemlist > itemlist.txt
Note that there will be more than 50M items returned by this query, so that command will take a very long time to complete (results are returned in 10k chunks). You'll probably also want to add something like `--timeout 300` as well so you don't get half way through only for the command to fail with a timeout.
u/stavros wrote a design doc for a system (Codename "Elephant") that would scale this up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45559219
(no affiliation, I am just a rando; if you are a library, museum, or similar institution, ask IA to drop some racks at your colo for replication, and as always, don't forget to donate to IA when able to and be kind to their infrastructure)
I would like to be able to pull content out of the Wayback Machine with a proper API [1]. I'd even be willing to pay a combination of per-request and per-gigabyte fees to do it. But then I think about the Archive's special status as a non-profit library, and I'm not sure that offering paid API access (even just to cover costs) is compatible with the organization as it exists.
[1] It looks like this might exist at some level, e.g. https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader, but I've been trying to use this for a couple of weeks and every day I try I get a 5xx error or "connection refused".
https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/tree/master/wayba...
https://akamhy.github.io/waybackpy/
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Restoring
They have come a very long way since the late 1990s when I was working there as a sysadmin and the data center was a couple of racks plus a tape robot in a back room of the Presidio office with an alarmingly slanted floor. The tape robot vendor had to come out and recalibrate the tape drives more often than I might have wanted.
There is a fundamental resistance to tape technology that exists to this day as a result of all those troubles.
>And the rising popularity of generative AI adds yet another unpredictable dimension to the future survival of the public domain archive.
I'd say the nonprofit has found itself a profitable reason for its existence
Does IA do deduplication?
Not in the way I think you're talking about. The archive has always tried to maintain a situation where the racks could be pushed out of the door or picked up after being somewhere and the individual drives will contain complete versions of the items. We have definitely reached out to people who seem to be doing redundant work and ask them to stop or for permission to remove the redundant item. But that's a pretty curatorial process.
Yes[1].
[1]: The Article, Paragraph 2
I don't think the article mentions anything about deduplication. Can you be less snarky and actually quote the relevant sentence?