Archiving the Internet in Canada ⇥ motherboard.vice.com

Jordan Pearson, Vice:

The Internet Archive is a US-based nonprofit that has been archiving the web for 20 years. So far, they’ve cataloged petabytes worth of web pages and claim to continue to archive 300 million new web pages each week. Their massive database allows the organization to run services like the Wayback Machine, which anyone can use to visit an archived version of most web pages, sometimes dating back years.

The group prefers to refer to itself as a kind of library, and as it noted in a blog post on Tuesday, “the history of libraries is one of loss,” whether through natural disaster or political regime change. With a potentially pro-censorship Trump regime looming, the Internet Archive isn’t taking any chances and is planning on opening an “Internet Archive of Canada” in the land of toques and Labatt brews. Digital information stored abroad wouldn’t be subject to US censorship laws.

If you rely upon the Internet Archive as much as I do, you can give them money to keep preserving websites, live audio recordings, classic PC games, and loads more.

See Also: Jason Scott’s explanation of the cost — in bytes and dollars — of creating a backup of the Internet Archive.