It's frustrating that there's no way for people to (selectively) mirror the Internet Archive. $25-30M per year is a lot for a non-profit, but it's nothing for government agencies, or private corporations building Gen AI models.
I suspect having a few different teams competing (for funding) to provide mirrors would rapidly reduce the hardware cost too.
The density + power dissipation numbers quoted are extremely poor compared to enterprise storage. Hardware costs for the enterprise systems are also well below AWS (even assuming a short 5 year depreciation cycle on the enterprise boxes). Neither this article nor the vendors publish enough pricing information to do a thorough total cost of ownership analysis, but I can imagine someone the size of IA would not be paying normal margins to their vendors.
(no affiliation, I am just a rando; if you are a library, museum, or similar institution, ask IA to drop some racks at your colo for replication, and as always, don't forget to donate to IA when able to and be kind to their infrastructure)
There are real problems with the Torrent files for collections. They are automatically created when a collection is first created and uploaded, and so they only include the files of the initial upload. For very large collections (100+ GB) it is common for a creator to add/upload files into a collection in batches, but the torrent file is never regenerated, so download with the torrent results in just a small subset of the entire collection.
The solution is to use one of the several IA downloader script on GitHub, which download content via the collection's file list. I don't like directly downloading since I know that is most cost to IA, but torrents really are an option for some collections.
Turns out, there are a lot of 500BG-2TB collections for ROMs/ISOs for video game consoles through the 7th and 8th generation, available on the IA...
Is this something the Internet Archive could fix? I would have expected the torrent to get replaced when an upload is changed, maybe with some kind of 24 hour debounce.
It sounds like they put this mechanism into place that stops regenerating large torrents incrementally when it caused massive slowdowns for them, and haven't finished building something to automatically fix it, but will go fix individual ones on demand for now.
I agree it is not perfect current state, and improvements are going to require coordination with the Internet Archive. With that said, I was confident that torrent files were regenerated when items changed (via a derive operation), so I'll have to do more research and test to speak authoritatively on this.
It's insane to me that in 2008 a bunch of pervs decentralized storage and made hentai@home to host hentai comics. Yet here we are almost 20 years later and we haven't generalized this solution. Yes I'm aware of the privacy issues h@h has (as a hoster you're exposing your real IP and people reading comics are exposing their IP to you) but those can be solved with tunnels, the real value is the redundant storage.
I would like to be able to pull content out of the Wayback Machine with a proper API [1]. I'd even be willing to pay a combination of per-request and per-gigabyte fees to do it. But then I think about the Archive's special status as a non-profit library, and I'm not sure that offering paid API access (even just to cover costs) is compatible with the organization as it exists.
[1] It looks like this might exist at some level, e.g. https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader, but I've been trying to use this for a couple of weeks and every day I try I get a HTTP 5xx error or "connection refused."
Yes, there are documents and third party projects indicating that it has a free public API, but I haven't been able to get it to work. I presume that a paid API would have better availability and the possibility of support.
I just tried waybackpy and I'm getting errors with it too when I try to reproduce their basic demo operation:
>>> from waybackpy import WaybackMachineSaveAPI
>>> url = "https://nuclearweaponarchive.org"
>>> user_agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0"
>>> save_api = WaybackMachineSaveAPI(url, user_agent)
>>> save_api.save()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<python-input-4>", line 1, in <module>
save_api.save()
~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^
File "/Users/xxx/nuclearweapons-archive/venv/lib/python3.13/site-packages/waybackpy/save_api.py", line 210, in save
self.get_save_request_headers()
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^
File "/Users/xxx/nuclearweapons-archive/venv/lib/python3.13/site-packages/waybackpy/save_api.py", line 99, in get_save_request_headers
raise TooManyRequestsError(
...<4 lines>...
)
waybackpy.exceptions.TooManyRequestsError: Can not save 'https://nuclearweaponarchive.org'. Save request refused by the server. Save Page Now limits saving 15 URLs per minutes. Try waiting for 5 minutes and then try again.
Reach out to patron services, support @ archive dot org. Also, your API limits will be higher if you specify your API key from your IA user versus anonymous requests when making requests.
They have come a very long way since the late 1990s when I was working there as a sysadmin and the data center was a couple of racks plus a tape robot in a back room of the Presidio office with an alarmingly slanted floor. The tape robot vendor had to come out and recalibrate the tape drives more often than I might have wanted.
We had a little server room where the AC was mounted directly over the rack. I don't think we ever put an umbrella in there but it sure made everyone nervous the drain pipe would clog.
Much more recently, I worked at a medium-large SaaS company but if you listened to my coworkers you'd think we were Google (there is a point where optimism starts being delusion, and a couple of my coworkers were past it.)
Then one day I found the telemetry pages for Wikipedia. I am hoping some of those charts were per hour not per second, otherwise they are dealing with mind numbing amounts of traffic.
Not in the way I think you're talking about. The archive has always tried to maintain a situation where the racks could be pushed out of the door or picked up after being somewhere and the individual drives will contain complete versions of the items. We have definitely reached out to people who seem to be doing redundant work and ask them to stop or for permission to remove the redundant item. But that's a pretty curatorial process.
"Here, amidst the repurposed neoclassical columns and wooden pews of a building constructed to worship a different kind of permanence, lies the physical manifestation of the "virtual" world. We tend to think of the internet as an ethereal cloud, a place without geography or mass. But in this building, the internet has weight. It has heat. It requires electricity, maintenance, and a constant battle against the second law of thermodynamics. As of late 2025, this machine—collectively known as the Wayback Machine—has archived over one trillion web pages.1 It holds 99 petabytes of unique data, a number that expands to over 212 petabytes when accounting for backups and redundancy.3"
can you help my small brain by pointing out where in this paragraph they talk about deduplication?
Probably because this looks more like a Deep Research agent "delving" into the infrastructure -- with a giant list of sources at the end. The Archive is not just a library; it is a service provider.
I suspect having a few different teams competing (for funding) to provide mirrors would rapidly reduce the hardware cost too.
The density + power dissipation numbers quoted are extremely poor compared to enterprise storage. Hardware costs for the enterprise systems are also well below AWS (even assuming a short 5 year depreciation cycle on the enterprise boxes). Neither this article nor the vendors publish enough pricing information to do a thorough total cost of ownership analysis, but I can imagine someone the size of IA would not be paying normal margins to their vendors.
https://help.archive.org/help/archive-bittorrents/
https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive
https://archive.org/services/docs/api/internetarchive/cli.ht...
u/stavros wrote a design doc for a system (codename "Elephant") that would scale this up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45559219
(no affiliation, I am just a rando; if you are a library, museum, or similar institution, ask IA to drop some racks at your colo for replication, and as always, don't forget to donate to IA when able to and be kind to their infrastructure)
https://www.reddit.com/r/torrents/comments/vc0v08/question_a...
The solution is to use one of the several IA downloader script on GitHub, which download content via the collection's file list. I don't like directly downloading since I know that is most cost to IA, but torrents really are an option for some collections.
Turns out, there are a lot of 500BG-2TB collections for ROMs/ISOs for video game consoles through the 7th and 8th generation, available on the IA...
It sounds like they put this mechanism into place that stops regenerating large torrents incrementally when it caused massive slowdowns for them, and haven't finished building something to automatically fix it, but will go fix individual ones on demand for now.
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/theinternetarchive/comments/1ij8go9...
[1] It looks like this might exist at some level, e.g. https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader, but I've been trying to use this for a couple of weeks and every day I try I get a HTTP 5xx error or "connection refused."
https://akamhy.github.io/waybackpy/
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Restoring
I just tried waybackpy and I'm getting errors with it too when I try to reproduce their basic demo operation:
Much more recently, I worked at a medium-large SaaS company but if you listened to my coworkers you'd think we were Google (there is a point where optimism starts being delusion, and a couple of my coworkers were past it.)
Then one day I found the telemetry pages for Wikipedia. I am hoping some of those charts were per hour not per second, otherwise they are dealing with mind numbing amounts of traffic.
It just reads like a clunky low quality article
"Here, amidst the repurposed neoclassical columns and wooden pews of a building constructed to worship a different kind of permanence, lies the physical manifestation of the "virtual" world. We tend to think of the internet as an ethereal cloud, a place without geography or mass. But in this building, the internet has weight. It has heat. It requires electricity, maintenance, and a constant battle against the second law of thermodynamics. As of late 2025, this machine—collectively known as the Wayback Machine—has archived over one trillion web pages.1 It holds 99 petabytes of unique data, a number that expands to over 212 petabytes when accounting for backups and redundancy.3"
can you help my small brain by pointing out where in this paragraph they talk about deduplication?
I'd say the nonprofit has found itself a profitable reason for its existence