

Preserving The Internet... and Everything Else - cruise02
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/04/preserving-the-internet-and-everything-else.html

======
aristus
A couple of years ago I proposed a decentralized dead-tree archival network
using time capsules and a shared location map. I've made a few capsules
already.

<http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/09/paper-internet.html>

[http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/10/dead-media-
be...](http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/10/dead-media-beat-paper-
time-capsules-of-the-internet/)

------
benohear
I'm curious to see how we are going to navigate this data.

I'd love to see an etherpad type slider where you can see a page evolve.

Or could we have a search of the entire history of the internet? Or search and
browse the internet "as it was in 2007"? It's fascinating to think that Google
"only" allows you to search a snapshot of the internet as it is now.

On the other hand the death of the ephemeral scares me a bit. It's like
watching Captain Flam again as an adult. If you loved it as a kid, heed this
warning - don't do it.

------
zoul
Is it really _that_ paramount to keep most of the web around? The obvious
knee-jerk answer is that it’s a great resource about our history, but
honestly, I would not care if most of the web simply perished the natural way.
It’s only seldom that I use the Wayback Machine and if the content I’m looking
for would not be there, it would be no big deal for me. Where is the point of
storing too much information?

~~~
tripzilch
> It’s only seldom that I use the Wayback Machine and if the content I’m
> looking for would not be there, it would be no big deal for me.

Depends on what sorts of thing you and me look for on the web, I suppose then.

I use the Wayback Machine regularly, and what I need from it is usually quite
valuable (to me), if I could not have found it anywhere else.

Only yesterday I was wandering along information about symmetry groups and
tilings of the plane, so you come across the Geometry Junkyard[1] ... dead
links all over the place as soon as you take more than a few steps! A lot of
those are old university home pages, the ones with ~s in them. If the person
doesn't work there anymore, they often rot, and the information doesn't always
get transferred to the next site or blog. I know I'm guilty of the same, quite
a few ancient old sites floating about that I never bothered collecting under
one domain. I know the IA has got them though :)

[1] <http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/junkyard/topic.html>

------
justincormack
Can I just not find it on the Internet Archive site, or is it really the case
that they only have one location? In an earthquake zone?

~~~
simonw
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive>

"To ensure the stability and endurance of the Internet Archive, its collection
is mirrored at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt."

~~~
justincormack
Although
[http://www.bibalex.org/isis/frontend/archive/archive_web.asp...](http://www.bibalex.org/isis/frontend/archive/archive_web.aspx)
says:

"The Internet Archive at the BA includes the web collection of 1996 through
2007. It represents about 1.5 petabytes of data stored on 880 computers."

So it seems to be a partial snapshot not a dynamic mirror.

