10 Petabytes of data saved by The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive has achieved an important goal in its endless quest to preserve the interconnected culture, ie a collection of 10 Petabytes of data (10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 10,000,000 Gigabytes) in digital format.

The Archive, a non-profit organization devoted to “building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form”, has recently announced the addition of the “10,000,000,000,000,000th byte” to its collection thanks to the work of supporters, volunteers and paid-staff.

The celebration for the 10 Petabytes-worth achievement included an organ performance by computer science legend Don Knuth and was almost ruined by a power blackout, the Internet Archive blog said.

Among the giant collection of digital artifacts collected throughout its eleven years of activity, the organization counts huge Web snapsnots from its crawlers and the “first” complete literature of a people that went on-line – the Balinese Digital Library Collection.

All the 10 Petabytes of digital data collected by the Internet Archive are freely and publicly available to everyone – be they researchers, historians or simply computer users. The most noteworthy projects of the Archive include the Wayback Machine, a “time machine” of the web hosting billions of web pages as they looked at a fixed point in time.

Source: Internet Archive Blogs