> I understand the sentiment that you can't trust content on the web to be there forever
The thing is, people say this, and I am sure for some amount of content it's true. However I eventually realised I have never had a single issue if required, in retrieving literally any piece of software or digital content after the fact from somewhere on the internet.
It's pretty much why I care so little about what happens to my steam library when Gaben kicks it. If I get the urge to replay something in twenty years that I paid $3 dollars for and its suddenly gone, i'll just go find it elsewhere.
Once I had gotten pretty much everything I wanted from running a large scale storage system (largely to learn the in's and outs of linux/general storage concepts) I pretty much just gave it up. Its a lot of money to hold onto things that at this point, I pretty much know i'll always be able to recover elsewhere. I'd rather someone else pay the electricity/drive cost for me.
There is no comparable alternative to the Internet Archive though. They've gotten involved in several lawsuits and their future is far from guaranteed. They're an incredibly important organization, but I think it's too important of a project to be limited to one organization, or even one country or region of the earth. A solar flare could destroy a lot of history.
I don't know that the economics of having multiple Internet Archive-like organizations is currently feasible (I imagine getting funding for one of them is hard enough), but even a partial offline mirror hosted someplace else would be nice. Maybe to save space they could take the oldest version of a page, the newest, and the midmost version timewise, discarding all other versions. They could also heavily compress images, video and audio to save storage space (would increase processing costs, but if willing to throw out quality, could compress quickly and still save a bunch of space. E.g. downscale all videos to 480p and use veryfast preset and CRF 28 with ffmpeg. Even 240p is a lot better than nothing. A pixelated form of history is better than no history.)
I have the opposite and sadly accelerating experience.
Information is removed or altered constantly and usually,
I cannot find anything on the Internet Archive either.
For whatever reason WayBackMachine, for my use cases,
is nearly always blank.
But I look for semi-obscure publications and statements
from (nation)states and organizations.
The thing is, people say this, and I am sure for some amount of content it's true. However I eventually realised I have never had a single issue if required, in retrieving literally any piece of software or digital content after the fact from somewhere on the internet.
It's pretty much why I care so little about what happens to my steam library when Gaben kicks it. If I get the urge to replay something in twenty years that I paid $3 dollars for and its suddenly gone, i'll just go find it elsewhere.
Once I had gotten pretty much everything I wanted from running a large scale storage system (largely to learn the in's and outs of linux/general storage concepts) I pretty much just gave it up. Its a lot of money to hold onto things that at this point, I pretty much know i'll always be able to recover elsewhere. I'd rather someone else pay the electricity/drive cost for me.