The Internet Archive Just Backed Up an Entire Caribbean Island

By becoming the official custodian of an entire nation's history for the first time, the Internet Archive is expanding its already outsize role in preserving the digital world for posterity. From a report: Aruba has long been a special place for Stacy Argondizzo. For years, her family has vacationed on the tiny Caribbean Island every July. More recently it's been more than just a place to take a break from her work as a digital archivist -- becoming wholly a part of that work.

A project Argondizzo galvanized comes to full fruition this week. The Internet Archive is now home to the Aruba Collection, which hosts digitized versions of Aruba's National Library, National Archives, and other institutions including an archaeology museum and the University of Aruba. The collection comprises 101,376 items so far -- roughly one for each person who lives on the Island -- including 40,000 documents, 60,000 images, and seven 3D objects.

The Internet Archive is mostly known for trying to back up online resources like websites that don't have a government body advocating for their posterity. Being tapped to back up an entire nation's history takes the nonprofit into new territory, and it is a striking endorsement of its mission to bring as much information online as possible. "What makes Aruba unique is they have cooperation from all the leading cultural heritage players in the country," says Chris Freeland, the Internet Archive's director of library services. "It's just an awesome statement." The project is funded wholly by the Internet Archive, in line with its policy of generally letting anyone upload content.

Re:

[ShanghaiBill]

If they obtained any consent for this?

Acquiring and managing consent for 101,376 individual documents is unworkable.

It is even more unmanageable for the other 45 petabytes in the archive.

Re:

[ls671]

Makes me wonder who is backing up the archive, how many copies are there, geolocation, etc. ?

Restore Functionality?

[Roger W Moore]

It's not a proper backup unless you have a working restore capability. In the event that we lose Aruba due to rising sea levels from global warming what are the plans to restore it from backups?

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[Narcocide]

Presumably you just download it again from archive.org.

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[Local ID10T]

Donna Noble has been saved...

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[codebase7]

Well, unfortunately, they are still running the checksums.... all of those stupid bits of sand keep moving around.....

The problem with Internet Archive...

[LordHighExecutioner]

...is that it cannot archive itself [wikipedia.org].

Score: 0, Pedantic

[ElimGarak000]

*outsized

That's a headline!

[davidwr]

"Where do you back up 189 square kilometers of real estate?" - my first thought before I read the actual summary.

Re:

[pjt33]

Texas?

Internet Archive redundancy?

[chipperdog]

What does the Internet Archive have in place for redundancy, backups, and archives? Are they mirrored in multiple places around the globe? If they are the official archivist for the island nation, ensuring the archives survive system failures, political attacks, natural disasters, etc is paramount to the job.

July?

[Kerry Boehm]

My only question is why on earth they'd choose July to go to the Caribbean :)

Re:

[BranMan]

As someone who vacations on Aruba, I can answer that. Short answer is - it doesn't matter!

Aruba is close enough to the equator that it basically has no seasons. Right now? 80+ F / 30 C. Middle of January? 30 C. Middle of August? 30 C. Add in the facts that hurricanes / tropical storms can't reach it, that it has no tides, that traffic actually flows well there, and there really is no best or worst time to visit.

Though IIRC there is a slightly rainier season. Can't recall what it is. But the island

Re:

[Kerry Boehm]

I get that, I visit Jamaica twice a year but if you're in higher latitudes which I assumed they are, you want to go in the inhospitable months, around here we call it winter. I go to the Caribbean in Dec and early March. In July I can just step outside and have the Caribbean here. I've been a couple times in June and Aug I can say the humidity felt much worse than Dec-March but really, I'm just being a wise ass.