The Internet Archive Has Saved Over 10,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes of the Web 135
An anonymous reader writes "Last night, the Internet Archive threw a party; hundreds of Internet Archive supporters, volunteers, and staff celebrated that the site had passed the 10,000,000,000,000,000 byte mark for archiving the Internet. As the non-profit digital library, known for its Wayback Machine service, points out, the organization has thus now saved 10 petabytes of cultural material."
The announcement coincided with the release of an 80-terabyte dataset for researchers and, for the first time, the complete literature of a people: the Balinese.
Relevance of byte count (Score:5, Funny)
How much of that is porn, I wonder.
Re:Relevance of byte count (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Relevance of byte count (Score:5, Insightful)
They have over 1.5 million unique audio files in the Live Music Archive alone. I know because I helped them count. (That's unique files, not counting the duplicates in different formats.) If the RIAA has anything to say about it, they're serious slacking.
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Sweet! Did you guys save my Geocities page too?
Re:Relevance of byte count (Score:5, Funny)
There is a torrent on thepiratebay of every single geocities site. It's an archive, but i've downloaded it. What was your site? I'll rar it up for you.
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Re:Relevance of byte count (Score:5, Interesting)
No, go ahead and mod me down. Every time i post, I look at my user ID and think "GOD FUCKING DAMNIT IF I HAD WAITED LIKE TEN MINUTES I WOULD HAVE HAD A PALINDROME AUAUUUUUUGGGHHH"
i deserve all the downmods i get, accidental or otherwise.
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You probably wouldn't have gotten a palindrome. Instead, you'd be even more angry for having missed the palindrome even more closely.
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I'm only one off of a palindrome. I don't think it's possible to be any closer.
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Probably. I found a copy of my first-ever homepage, which actually predated Geocities, and was probably even more useless than your average Geocities page. :)
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Nope, as good as Archive.org is, most of the pre-2000 stuff is gone forever. Much of my old gaming site is there, but not all of it. The only surviving page of Janet "Kneel" Harriott's Yello There is one I posted on my gaming site. Very liitle of mcgrew.info survives.
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They have over 1.5 million unique audio files in the Live Music Archive alone.
Since they can't be copied per the terms of the TOS, what good do they serve? Why bother counting something you technically can't access?
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Because eventually they WILL be accessable when copyright runs out. But if nobody other than the 'rightsholders' have copies, that wouldn't matter, they could trivially remaster them, then have copyright over the remasters for another century after destroying the originals so they could never get out.
Re:Relevance of byte count (Score:5, Funny)
when copyright runs out
Thanks for the laugh.
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I think you must be looking at the wrong part of the Archive. Everything in the Live Music section and the Netlabels section is public domain or licensed under a CC license or equivalent. The media collections are separate from the Wayback Machine.
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Since they can't be copied per the terms of the TOS
What are you talking about? A lot of friends of mine host their music on Archive.org.
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If only one of those files is a MP3, the RIAA is going to have an orgasm.
Correction: Evilgasm.
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4kB should be enough for anyone.
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They're exaggerating; I know there are only 256 bytes, so I think they're counting duplicates!
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How much of that is porn, I wonder.
Actually, only about half. The other half is lolcats.
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Balinese, huh? (Score:2, Funny)
Well, I guess they didn't have time to write much, being busy dealing with Orcs and Balrogs.
What about the Thorinim?
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Indeed! (Score:3, Funny)
And nothing of value was saved...
Yes, but... (Score:5, Funny)
I need a car analogy about the Library of Congress before i can understand that number.
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Re:Yes, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
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this is approximately ~2 Library of Congresses of data, which is just a tad bit much to fit in the trunk of your car. It's going to take a few trips to the Library and back to move that data around.
In books, yes. In 32GByte MicroSD cards, it might be possible to do it in one trip with a large enough vehicle.
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If you live in Vancouver, it's roughly the number of nanometers you would cover on a round trip drive to the Library of Congress.
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The First Council of the Druids will find a way to recover the data.
And when they do, they will be known as the Disk Druids.
Indispensable reference for slashdotters (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you choose a date? Whose company would you enjoy?
Well, one thing you can consider is looks. Woody thought of Janice and how good looking she was. He'd really have to rate to date her. Yes, he'd enjoy that, except... Well, it's too bad Janice always acts so superior. She'd make a fellow feel awkward and bored.
Well, perhaps someone who doesn't feel so superior. There's Betty. And yet, it just doesn't seem as if she'd be much fun.
What about Anne? She knows how to have a good time, and how to make the fellow with her relax, too. Yes, that's what a boy likes.
Yes, the Internet now provides everything you ever needed to know but were afraid to ask.
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How do you choose a date? Whose company would you enjoy? ... Well, it's too bad Janice always acts so superior. She'd make a fellow feel awkward and bored. ... What about Anne? She knows how to have a good time, and how to make the fellow with her relax, too. Yes, that's what a boy likes.
Yes Janice, get your head out of your ass. You could take a few tips from Anne -- she's a pro."
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Incorrect. A kibibyte is 1024 bytes, while a kilobyte is 1000 bytes. [wikipedia.org]
I don't usually care enough to point out the distinction, but since you did, I figured a correction was appropriate.
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No it's not. It's sometimes convenient to do so, especially for RAM, but the prefixes used are defined by the SI and recognised by a large number of international organisations including the IEEE.
Yes, marketing people find this useful. But it's also recognised as correct by many engineers. It's actually quite useful. Using a certain type of modulation, a 1KHz signal
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Which rules? Where is a kilobyte defined as 1024 bytes by any organisation with any influence?
And why base it on powers of two? It's illogical. The only time you're forced into a power of two is in the address space available to a CPU.
All of which is rather useless... (Score:5, Interesting)
...since the TOS specifically prohibits copying data from the site:
"Our terms of use specify that users of the Wayback Machine are not to copy data from the collection. If there are special circumstances that you think the Archive should consider, please contact info at archive dot org. "
Warrick hasn't been taking new requests for months (and I'm sure it's more of a research tool than an actual service for the public), and the site effectively blocks attempts to backup data using wget. It makes me wonder who (or what) this archive really serves, because it's most certainly not the general public.
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A) You can read it just like you can read normal webpages on the main web, most of which also don't allow you to copy them.
B) The Archive is more than just the Wayback machine. They also have what is almost certainly the worlds largest digital collection of public domain and CC-licensed media files in their media collections.
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On A: reading webpages IS copying them. Any attempt at distinction, given the technical details, is INSANE.
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No, -h always takes the largest applicable unit. Thus it would report 9 Petabytes. No wait, 8 Petabytes, because it always rounds down.
They Should Copy All Of The Web Site (Score:2)
I have never understood why the few archive sites, that I have been to, never back up the entire web site, instead of just a few important pages and images. I can understand not accessing pages that are supposed to be secure, but all other pages should be fair game. This is most important for product knowledge. Some times a company takes down its site and images. It would be nice to have an archive to go to.
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Very confusing [illinois.edu]
looks like you forgot to add '-h' switch (Score:4, Insightful)
10,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes = 8.88 Petabytes
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looks like you forgot to spell pebibytes correctly
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They should have made a pebibyte 1,000,000,000,000,000. Trying to redefine petabyte was stupid.
Re:looks like you forgot to add '-h' switch (Score:5, Informative)
You have that backwards, kilo, mega, giga, tera and so forth are base ten prefixes and have been for quite a bit longer than people have been misusing them to refer to base 2 numbers. As such it made more sense to leave it consistent with everything else and make a new prefix for the binary numbers.
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As such it made more sense to leave it consistent with everything else and make a new prefix for the binary numbers.
In the context of storage sizes they were well-established with the binary-based definitions, so changing them to be decimal-based isn't "leaving" anything.
Not true. In the context of storage sizes they were well-established to be base-10 definitions from the dawn of the computer age up until the 1980s or so. Only in the last 30 years or so have we started using powers of two units, and then only for RAM. Up until then, RAM was measured in powers-of-10 words, and in disk-based storage base 10 was and still is the norm. Network data rates likewise are and always have been in powers-of-10 units.
This is why it's useful to be careful to use the proper prefix
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No. If they were to rename the decimal prefixes they would have to call it peDEbyte. Bi stands for binary after all. Incidently, pede is French for "gay" in the sense of homosexual.
Is there another meaning of "gay"?
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Is there another meaning of "gay"?
Within living memory (my own memory in fact) "Gay" didn't mean "homosexual", it meant happy and carefree. The Christmas song "deck the Halls" isn't about transvestites ("Don we now our gay apparell").
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Yeah, when I read through my old Heinlein, I get a chuckle nowadays. He tended to use gay fairly often...the old definition, of course.
Domain parkers deleting archives (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know if they have done anything about this recently, but there was a problem with domain parking sites putting up a robots.txt that instructs Archive.org to delete or suppress any archives of the site that was there previously. Have run in to a few sites like that. If someone dies and their site goes with them, it isn't right for some squatter to remove their work from history.
And I wish I could pull up historic copies of the original altavista.digital.com.
Download Link? (Score:5, Interesting)
How nice of them to do the archiving and release such a large dataset.
Where can I download the file?
My Poor Infringed Copyright!! (Score:5, Funny)
It looks like they've copied my website and are therefore infringing my copyright.
But I won't be suing them because I don't mind, because I'm not Apple.
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I'd be very interested in that. One thing I've started to wonder about is what will happen to my website after my death. Archive.org stopped archiving changes on my site in 2005 and it only did a so-so job of capturing things anyway. Ages after I'm gone, it's likely http websites may simply have gone away. I've started looking into services that will preserve my site for historical reasons, but I'd feel a lot better having it among a dedicated catalogue in a historical preservation.
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If you want to keep something private, maybe you shouldn't make it available to everyone on the Web?
What the hell (Score:5, Interesting)
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more disks, and they send a copy to euroarchive and the Library of Alexandria. in 2006, that copy & verify process to remote site took two weeks.
http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/technology/features/article.php/3633256/The-Wayback-Machine-From-Petabytes-to-PetaBoxes.htm [enterprise...eforum.com]
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Why, the internet of course.
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Isn't that a bit like doing a Google search for "google" ?
Just fucking say Petabytes. (Score:3)
I know the prefix invokes unpleasant connotations, but it also means 10^15.
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(This is in reference to the headline.)
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I know the prefix invokes unpleasant connotations, but it also means 10^15.
When I see the word "peta" I think of naked supermodels in public protesting about animals, or something. Call me superficial but I'm prepared not to worry about the animals they're insulting if I get to see more naked supermodels.
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They should print it all off, for safekeeping.
We would then be able to get a more realistic Libraries of Congress measurement.
Were's my page then? (Score:3, Informative)
Moar Pics! (Score:2)
Shame about the lack of images*, archive.org is the only remaining evidence of Cliff Bleszinski's Cat-Scan.com [archive.org]. The site doesn't have the same comedy value without all the scans of squished cats.
*Yes, yes, I know that archiving images would require many extra fucktons of storage, but it would be worth it in some cases.
Private archive (Score:4, Interesting)
It's great that archive.org is doing this, but it's such an important part of history so I thought I would do a mini-version for the pages I visit, just to be able to refer back to stuff. I've been using the Firefox addon called Shelve to save all pages I visit on my home computer for about 2 months now (at most one version for each day). It's a total of 5.8 GB. It's not useful for browsing though, I'd love it if it was better integrated with Firefox such that I could choose among all versions of each page. There's sometimes some excellent information on university pages or cheap hosting, that could be 10 years old, and you never really know how long it's going to stay up..
Anyway, this may give some perspective too; 2 months of daily snapshots of slashdot, other news, some tech stuff and a little Facebook takes just 5.8 GB.
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It's a total of 5.8 GB.
Seems I forgot the most important part: It's a total of over 6,000,000,000 bytes!!1
What file system are they using (Score:2)
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Given how incomplete the stored sites are, I guess most of the data is stored on /dev/null.
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10 Petabytes of information is insignificant. My corporate network has that much data, and backs up several hundred Terabytes nightly.
data!=information