WAYBACK MACHINE: THE INTERNET’S TIME CAPSULE

At 300 Funston Street in San Francisco’s Richmond District, there’s an old Christian Science church. Walk up it’s palatial steps, past Corinthian columns and urns, into the bowels of a vaulted sanctuary — and you’ll find a copy of the internet.

In a backroom where pastors once congregated stand rows of computer servers, flickering en masse with blue light, humming the hymnal of technological grace.

This is the home of the Internet Archive, a non-profit that has, for 22 years, been preserving our online history: Billions of web pages, tweets, news articles, videos, and memes.

It is not a task for the weary. The internet is an enormous, ethereal place in a constant state of rot. It houses 1.8B web pages (644m of which are active), and doubles in size every 2-5 years — yet the average web page lasts just 100 days, and most articles are forgotten 5 minutes after publication.

Without backup, these items are lost to time. But archiving it all comes with sizeable responsibilities: What do you choose to preserve? How do you preserve it? And ultimately, why does it all matter?

Today, the Wayback Machine houses some 388B web pages, and its parent, the Internet Archive, is the world’s largest library.

The Internet Archive’s collection, which spans not just the web, but books, audio 78rpm records, videos, images, and software, amounts to more than 40 petabytes, or 40 million gigabytes, of data. The Wayback Machine makes up about 63% of that.

By comparison, the US Library of Congress contains roughly i>28 terabytes of text — less than 0.1% of the Internet Archive’s storage.

To read the complete article, see:
Inside Wayback Machine, the internet’s time capsul (https://thehustle.co/inside-wayback-machine-internet-archive)

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