The Internet Archive Returns Just in the Nick of Time
gizmodo.com
The digital library was taken offline by multiple cyberattacks last month and had been operating in read-only mode until Monday.

After its website was crippled for nearly a month by a cyberattack, the Internet Archive announced on Monday that it had restored one of its most valuable services—the Save Page Now feature that allows users to add copies of webpages to the organization’s digital library.

In a social media post, the Internet Archive said web pages that users had attempted to save since October 9 are beginning to be archived now, although it did not provide an estimate for when the process would be completed. So, if you were worried that all of that election coverage was in danger of disappearing, the Archive says it’s handling the backlog. And if you stopped archiving because it was down, get back to work.

The organization had been operating its collection in read-only mode since October 21 as it steadily worked to restore services.

Founded in 1996, the Internet Archive is a nonprofit based in San Francisco that provides access to historic web pages, digitized books, and a variety of other media that it has uploaded through its partnerships with hundreds of physical libraries and other partners.

Its unparalleled collection currently contains 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, 15 million audio recordings, 10.6 million videos, 4.8 million images, and 1 million software programs.

  • masquenox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    2 months ago

    “belongs to the USA, and as we all know, this horrendous and hypocritical government supports the genocide that is being carried out by the terrorist state of ‘Israel.'”

    Now that’s a false-flag if I ever saw one. Out of all the sites of arms manufacturers, funding operations and troll-farms that directly support Israel, these creeps attack… the Internet Archive?

    Tell me another one.

  • ouch@lemmy.worldEnglish
    24·
    2 months ago

    I don’t know what kind of architecture web.archive.org has, but when it was offline, I thought that we should really have something distributed that would allow people to store and host a copy of all websites that are important for them.

  • LittleBobbyTables@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    14·
    2 months ago

    A friendly reminder to everyone to check out ArchiveBox if you’re looking for a self-hosted archiving solution. I’ve been using it for a while now and it works great; it can be a little rough around the edges at times, but I think it’s a wonderful tool. It’s allowed me to continue saving pages during the Internet Archive’s outage.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      What sort of content are you archiving. I was trying to backup Wikipedia at some point and it was just a nightmare.

    • ArchRecord@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      I like ArchiveBox, but in my experience, it kept on running into issues saving pages, and stopped functioning after it worked the first few times. I really wish there was a more streamlined application that did a similar thing somewhere out there.

      I’ve been looking at Linkwarden’s page archiving solution, but it crashes whenever I try importing any large number of links, so that’s a bust too.

  • Nytixus@kbin.melroy.org
    8·
    2 months ago

    They’ve also restored the ability to play audio files, like archived old podcasts and stuff. Which is nice.

    Still, fuck the people that randomly decided to harm Internet Archive. It was really on the threat of being a digitalized Burning of Alexandria moment.

    • glimse@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      2 months ago

      It surely wasn’t random. There’s people out there who don’t want you to have anything for free

  • fishos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    510·
    2 months ago

    Interesting how the save now feature was broken until right up until the US election. Makes it easier to edit news articles on the fly without leaving a trail. Could be a motive for who was behind it - but I’m just speculating.

    • antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      16·
      2 months ago

      Yeah, totally makes sense, “they” attacked IA one month in advance before the elections, knowing that IA would spend around a month rewriting and improving their site code until the Save Page option would be enabled again (unless IA themselves are a part of the plot???), so that news articles could be “edited on the fly” (with what result?) until the election day, while other similar web archiving services such as archive.is would keep working just fine.