If You have any video game shit you want to save on Internet Archive/Wayback Machine do so now - Chuck Wendig Breaks The Internet

[Wilhelm Bittrich]

Digital storage doesn't last forever. We need to write the code out on pieces of paper so that it can truly be secured

Fahrenheit 451 was written for a reason, it seems.

 

[CIA Nigger]

Jason Scott should now go apologize to exhentai guys and ask them to help him host his archived works that absolutely shouldn't be lost to time such as "top 500 shareware software for Windows 95" or "1000 duke nukem levels".

Unless people pull and zip the whole thing, there aren’t going to be torrents of a lot of the stuff on IA. Who actually wants copies of old, bad C64 games? Not to mention that some of the stuff on there has been put through emulators and Dosboxed, none of which is stuff I want to deal with

This reminded me of something I have heard about archive.org in the past from another archivist on IRC (who has done a lot of work preserving some rare documents and who I have some respect for). It's also what I think the future of archiving is going to be.

This guy's archiving operation was a one man job done as a side project while working for whoever he worked for. Unlike Archive.org his archive setup revolved around mirrors not controlled by a sole individual person, a smart move. His mindset when uploading files to his site revolved around if it was legal to distribute these or would piss anyone off, with copyright laws being as long as they are and the sheer amount of legal cows who want to sue you over the most minor shit. He had actually scanned in some documents he was only going to release when he felt that that issue wouldn't be a problem.

On the other hand, he was a huge critic of people like Jason Scott/Brewster Kahle and IA because their strategy was to upload it first, then take it down when they got a DMCA. He was worried that this strategy was going to bite them in the ass and sure enough it did. While archive.org did a good service with scanning old/rare/out of print/expensive books, nobody at the IA took a minute to stop and think "is it really a good idea to upload a Harry Potter or Game of Thrones book to the IA".

Then there was the National Emergency Library stunt and while it pissed off Wendig (who became the public face/fall guy for all of this), plenty of "writer guilds" and "unions" were ready to sue the shit out of IA over this.

I personally think the future of archiving is going to be much smaller, focused archives like MacintoshGarden (old 68k/PPC Mac software) or decentralized ones like libgen. The ArchiveTeam page on Libgen mentions their strategy: it relies on both mirrors and actually contains torrents of the entire collection (32tb in total so far).

 

[Dysnomia]

Holy fuckcicles. How long until the mass deletion?