Archive.is blog

archive-is:

daveymames:

archive-is:

I do not think there are many people willing to maintain such a project, which is also unprofitable. All 4½ projects over there - (IA, Archive.today, Megalodon.jp, half-suspensed WebCite, and paid Pinboard.in) look running on energy and money of a single person each and likely will be greatly changed or shutdown by the heirs.

I could only advise to save everything locally to sync your documents with your own lifespan. Do not rely on clouds.

You don’t need many people mate, just a small amount of people is all that’s required. I for example would be willing to accept a passing of the torch. I would fund it with my own money and allow people to donate. I’m planning a site similar to Archive.org of my own that allows uploading via torrents so you can upload big files which is hard to do on archive.org and it bans people who don’t keep 1TB of stuff permanently seeded. This way I don’t need to waste money on storage. 

How much does hosting cost you per month at the moment?

about ~$2600/mo of pure expenses on servers/domains, not counting “work time”, “buying laptop/furniture”, etc. ($100…300/mo covered by donations + $300…500 by ads)

I’d suggest starting with pdf/djvu archive:

 * It is of demand: people here often ask about archiving pdf/djvu and are particularly interested in archiving from another website rather than uploading (for some vague legal reasons).

 * Unlike archive.is, it is more a blob storage and fit to “store me a terabyte” model: there is no need to develop and support own file formats and its renderers.

 * There is a ready-made dataset to rescue and get some press attention on: Sci-Hub.

 * The mission is more about “save forever“ than our “keep a page online after the original took down or altered“.

Also, https://docs.softwareheritage.org/ is a storage-heavy  initiative which would need extra mirrors and crawlers. I need it as a user, especially immutable weekly snapshots of whole language repositories (such as maven.apache.org, npmjs.com, crates.io, …)