The Internet Archive is a US-based non-profit organization, whose aim is to preserve digital pages and programs for future generations as a sort of... archive of the internet. It’s the organization behind such efforts as Archive.org and the Wayback Machine. And now, citing the incoming Trump administration, the group is looking to backup its operations to Canada.
Citing natural disasters and political intrusion into its systems as existential threats to its mission, the Internet Archive is currently raising funds to back up its archive at a secondary site in Canada. Over the years, through different projects, the Internet Archive has collected over 15 petabytes of data, providing users around the world free access to countless websites, articles, software, and books. It even offers users access to Windows 3.1, all within your browser.
The Wayback Machine, one of the projects from the organization, also offers free access to a vast library of iterations of different websites. It’s one of the tools that’s constantly used by journalists, fact checkers, and even tech enthusiasts like us when investigating if companies or individuals altered digital materials after they were published. It’s also just a fun way to get to experience the web as it used to be, for example, Neowin back in 2001.
The entire organization is run on donations and generous support from users around the world, so the Internet Archive is currently fundraising the millions it says it needs to do a full backup of its archive, somewhere in Canada.
Once the backup is complete, the organization and its projects will continue to work normally, but the secondary site will provide redundancy and robustness to the system, making it much harder to be interfered with.
Source: Internet Archive
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