Preserving Cohost Material with Internet Archive Outage

[onlyknownothing]

The Internet Archive was intended to be the fall-back solution for cohost-hosted materials once the servers were shut down (which was scheduled for "when we run out of money to run them," stated as likely by the end of the year). The Internet Archive is also, currently, down. It is being targeted by DDOS attacks and has been hacked, with 31 million accounts known compromised. It is also a non-profit running on an already-limited budget due to having lost a major lawsuit brought by publishers over the summer.

While the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine" is seen as a foundational part of internet history, and something of a "utility" of the internet as a whole, there is no guarantee at this time that it will necessarily remain functional or be accessible for the purpose of archiving/accessing cohost material once the current servers go down.

I would suggest backing up anything on cohost's read-only site you may want to keep onto a local storage device if you are not currently in the position to (or do not desire to) remake those things elsewhere (such as your dreamwidth journal). Remember, two backups in different places are considered "bare minimum" for data retention for just this sort of reason.

I'm hoping things will get resolved in a way where a "worst case scenario" of data loss does not occur, but it's better to be prepared than to suddenly discover something you wanted to keep is lost to the digital void.

Alternatives to the Wayback Machine

[ysabetwordsmith]

onlyknownothing has pointed out that the Wayback Machine is down. Read more about the problem here. While this is among the most popular archives, it is not the only one. When it comes to data backups, more is better. Explore different archive sites, because they do things differently -- what won't save on one usually will save on another. When one is down, others are probably still up. Here are some options...

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