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Maybe they could start a Archive@Home project for volunteers to donate unused disk space for the greater good.


They do have that. All archives have torrents.


Which means somewhat popular, somewhat larger have backups. Important would be backups for things nobody else is interested in. The ones where one person in 10 years will ask for.


And half those torrents are missing half their files because the torrent generator races with the upload process and often runs on a half completed upload.


This has been a problem for years at this point and they still haven’t fixed it, it’s frankly bizarre.


https://getdweb.net/ is that project.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29639222

> As noted the Internet Archive is experimenting with filecoin.io and storj.io and is always open to suggestions about how we might do our jobs better, and improve our service. We also host regular meetups (and have hosted summits and a camp) related to the Decentralized Web. See: https://blog.archive.org/tag/dweb/

Inside The Internet Archive's Infrastructure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46613324 - February 2026 (119 comments)

u/stavros proposed "Elephant" as well, which could be implemented today without Archive.org's explicit assistance.

Elephant system design - https://gist.github.com/skorokithakis/68984ef699437c5129660d... (A distributed, voluntary backup system (high-level design document))

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46637992 (additional context)

(TLDR Every Archive.org item has a torrent, enabling distributed replication and serving of archived items and their contents, Wayback is a bit trickier; you can also ask your local nation state and museum/preservation apparatus to colocate some IA racks, if one is so inclined; The Internet Archive’s entire annual budget ($30M-$40M) covers 200PB storage plus all operations)


I know I'd love to run something like this!




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