With everything that’s happening there, I was wondering if it was possible. Obviously their size is massive, but I’m sure there’s a ton of duplicated stuff. Also some things are more important to preserve than others, and some things are preserved elsewhere (Anna’s Archive, Libgen, and Z-Lib come to mind that could preserve books if the IA disappeared).

But how could things get archived from the IA (assuming it’s possible) on both a personal level (aka I want to grab a copy of that wayback snapshot) and on a more wide scale community level? Are there people already working on it? If not, what would be the best theoretical way to get started?

And what are the most important things in your opinion that should be prioritized if the IA was about to disappear and we only had so much time and storage to utilize?

  • davel [he/him]
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    720 hours ago

    As others have and will say, it’s an enormous body of content. And this has sparked a shower thought.

    What about not trying to be a full, perfect backup, but instead a “best effort”/“better than no backup at all” shoestring budget backup? What about triage backup? What about stripped-down markup? What about lossy text compression?